Binge Read online

  I didn’t have a handler to ward off the screaming brats who invariably kicked me in the shins to see if I was real. A lot of kids wanted to hug Rooster Rick and pat his belly, which hung right in front of my dick. The park installed a piece of 3/4-inch plywood cap down there. Once a kid punched me there and screamed, “He’s hard! Why is Rooster Rick so hard?” LOL.

  The parents, of course, were tall enough to catch a glimpse of my face through the black fabric scrim covering Rick’s beak or Polo’s mouth. People wandering out from the beer garden always did that, and once they saw I was a guy, they left me alone. Hannah, who worked the same shifts as me, occasionally got groped by drunk guys and I had to go to the rescue. Go on YouTube and search “Guy in Lame Rooster Costume Punches Out Drunk Asshole.” Over two thousand views as of yesterday. [*Buffs fingernails on pecs.*]

  My life changed forever on Fried Chicken Night. A local fast-food franchise, Bell’s Chicken, sent their mascot, Miss Belle, to work the crowd. When I saw Miss Belle in the costume area, I was: a) jealous that someone else was competing for my audience, and b) in awe of how nice and clean Belle’s chicken costume was. I walked over to her and said, “It must be nice to have a boss who dry-cleans your outfits regularly.”

  She looked up at me then, and tipped her beak in despair. “Oh, dear God,” she said, “I’m a full-time chicken mascot. There’s nowhere lower to go.”

  “I don’t know about that. Being a puppeteer might be lower.”

  “No. When you’re a puppeteer, at least there’s a chance the audience is thinking, Hmmm…that puppeteer is funneling their subconscious into their characters. This isn’t just a puppet show, it’s art.”

  “I see what you mean. Inside my costume, I could be bashing my head in total despair at the meaninglessness of it all, and people on the midway would be saying, “Isn’t that adorable? That big chicken is New Wave dancing like it’s the 1980s!”

  A silence fell, and into it I finally said, “I’m Rooster Rick.”

  With a Southern accent, she replied, “And A’m Miss Belle.”

  “How long have you been doing this for?”

  “Part-time for a year, but as of tonight it’s a full-time gig.”

  “That’s pretty much what happened with me. I have a degree in Chaucer Studies!”

  “I have one in Sylvia Plath.”

  Just then my shift manager, Denny, came in, holding an oversized gold novelty key. “You chickens are onstage together in five minutes. Rick, you’ll be presenting Belle with this key to the park. After you hand it over, both of you dance. People love it when you costume people dance.”

  I muttered to Belle, “He can’t even bring himself to say the word ‘mascot.’ Quick: if you could do one thing to leave your mark on the planet, what would it be?”

  Belle considered for a moment, then said, “I’d like to create a ring around Earth, like the one around Saturn. Wouldn’t that be beautiful?”

  “It totally would.”

  “What about you?”

  I thought about it. “I’d like to be a philosopher scientist whose job is to sit alone in a lighthouse for weeks on end trying to think of something else in the universe that could be just as interesting as life, if not more interesting.”

  Belle came close and looked up at me. Through her scrim, I could just barely make out the face of a person my age. “I like your voice,” she said.

  “I like your voice too.”

  From behind us Denny shouted, “You two, onstage! Scram!”

  From the wings we could see a local AM radio sportscaster at the mike. Blah, blah, blah…“And now, in celebration of Fried Chicken Night, our beloved mascot Rooster Rick will be presenting the key to the park to the enchanting Bell’s Chicken mascot, Miss Belle. Let’s have a hand for these two crazy clucks!”

  We walked out on the stage, and after I handed Belle the key with a bow, we looked at each other as the music played. It was a perfect moment. Then she tossed the key to the crowd and she jumped my bones right there onstage. Everyone laughed: Look, Rick and Belle are doing it!

  But we kept right on doing it, and doing it, and after predictable shouts of “Get a room!” people started tossing the bones of their takeout Bell’s fried chicken at us.

  Finally, Denny chased us off the stage and back to the costume room. Laughing, we yanked off our heads, and then Denny fired me.

  “Fine by me,” I said.

  “Why don’t I join you?” Miss Belle said.

  Her name turned out to be Sarah. We went out for dinner, where we discovered that we’re both vegetarians. Cluck cluck!

  07

  Airplane Mode

  LAST MONTH I HAD TO fly to a drag convention in Florida. I wasn’t in full drag on the plane, but my hair was set in a flirty way and I was wearing light makeup, so it wasn’t hard to deduce that I was one of those pronoun people everyone talks about. Most of the time, if people comment on the makeup or hair, they’ll say something like “You’re rocking it, Mama!” and it makes travel fun. But once in awhile you do get a person like the woman in the check-in area for this flight, who wouldn’t stop glaring at me, obviously trying to facially convey to me her disapproval of my entire existence.

  The thing you learn about being different in whatever way is that maybe half the people you meet would, given full anonymity, open a trapdoor under you that dropped you into a pit of lava. Even the ones who smile at you. Especially the smilers. At first, I thought that at least the sour-faced scold in the check-in area was being honest, but then I found out she wasn’t content to just scowl.

  She ended up one person ahead of me at the security checkpoint, where I noticed the name on her carry-on tag: Linda Castleberry. Castleberry? Then I switched my brain into airplane mode, the one you use to tolerate the relentless indignities of air travel. I saw Ms. Castleberry talking to one of the inspectors, who turned to stare at me. Oh crap, what has this woman done? I found out two minutes later, when it was my turn to go through the scanner and…*Braaap!* I got a fake random.

  “If you could come this way with me, sir/ma’am…”

  The inspector escorted me to a private examination room where two female officers were waiting.

  “Please undress down to your undergarments,” one of them instructed.

  Pat. Pat. Pat.

  No problem.

  Then the women looked at each other in a you-go-first-no-you-go kind of way until finally the older one said, “Sir/ma’am, do you have anything inside an orifice that we should be aware of?”

  That fucking, sour-faced cow Linda. “What? No!”

  “I’m sorry but we have to check.”

  “I promise you my mangina does not harbor a minaret-shaped handgun.”

  But my protests fell on deaf ears and down came the underwear, and inspect they did.

  As their rubber-gloved fingers were probing my private places, I devised my revenge.

  Once they cleared me, I called my millennial friend and neighbor Olivia and told her what I needed her to do. “But go to the payphone on the corner outside the Circle K to make the call. You need to be untraceable. Please do it now.”

  “It’s cold out.”

  “Put on ten sweaters.”

  In the gate area, I walked up to La Castleberry. “I heard the weather is supposed to be wonderful in Florida.”

  “Did you now?”

  “I did.” Keeping it light, I mentioned the details of my protracted inspection (which is what she wanted to hear). I got deliberately graphic (which she didn’t want to hear).

  “When they check your private areas,” I said, “they use the tops of their fingers, not the palm sides.”

  She couldn’t help asking me why.

  “Because it’s scientifically impossible to derive much in the way of erotic stimulus from nerves on the tops of your hands.”

 
“Really?”

  “Yes. Also, you in particular might like to know they didn’t find a minaret-shaped handgun inside my mangina.”

  Dagger eyes: “You transvestites pollute the world. You all need medical help.”

  “I’m not a transvestite. It’s called drag, and it’s a way of tasting a bit of power you probably never had anywhere else in your life.”

  The flight was delayed by an hour. Good. More time for Olivia’s work to bear fruit. I looked at the clock: Please, Olivia, don’t fuck this up.

  Boarding finally began, and I was behind Ms. Castleberry at the end of the line. When they scanned her boarding pass, it beeped (YES!!!!!) and the gate agent’s face went blank. She tapped through some windows on her screen and said, “I’m sorry, Ms. Castleberry, but we can’t allow you on this flight. We have credible reason to believe you have a nut allergy, and as a result, you can’t board any flight on this airline until the plane has been cleared of peanut fragments.”

  LOL!

  As Ms. Castleberry began to rant, the gate agent signaled to two nearby airport security police, who came and loomed over her. “Ma’am, if you continue to make a scene, these officers will arrest you. It will take twenty-four to forty-eight hours to certify a nut-fragment-free plane to your destination. Go back to the arrivals level and speak with an agent about rescheduling your flight.”

  As Ms. Castleberry stomped past me, I leaned toward her and whispered: “For the rest of your life, just before you fall asleep at night, remember this: You are not a good person.”

  08

  Lube

  I’VE NEVER LIKED THE sensation of clothing on my body. Even something as simple as putting on a T-shirt makes my skin shudder and I make those involuntary raptor hands, just like Mr. Burns.

  I know that winter climates make this tough, but honestly, would society disintegrate if we went around naked? So what if people flash a bit of dick or boob? Are we that horny and uncontrollable? There’s at least some evidence that we’re not: one way to look at the past five hundred years is as a progression of people wearing successively fewer and smaller garments. My dad always used to wear a hat and then, in the middle of 1965, he and every other man in America stopped and the world didn’t end. Maybe in fifty years we’ll be walking down the street on Sundays wearing only string ties, headed off to worship, I don’t know, a statue of Walt Disney made out of depleted uranium.

  I got divorced in my late fifties, and after the papers were signed, I did try going to a few nudist resorts. But something struck me as not right about women with pancake tits playing volleyball while their kids sat on the sidelines cheering. It just wasn’t for me. Even though everyone at the resorts would say things like “Golly, we just like the sensation of sun on our skin. Nudist camps aren’t about sex,” they must not have been walking past the shrubs where Miss Schoolteacher was getting schlonged by the dwarf who leaf-blows the tennis courts.

  So, anyway, from that point on, no nude beaches for me, but then one afternoon, there I was on my fenced-in deck—about the size of the kids table at a Thanksgiving dinner—on my condo’s roof, responsibly taking in some vitamin D on my recliner, feeling naked and open and free, the way God intended.

  At first I was rethinking a spreadsheet I was in the middle of creating at work, but then my mind shifted to Carolina, this foxy little Brazilian number who runs the front desk. Before you know it, okay, sure, whatever, in the privacy of my little deck, I grabbed my tube of lube and started a bit of a hand party.

  Eyes shut, I was nearing a conclusion when I heard a whirring noise like a small electric fan. I looked up and there was a drone hovering right above me. What the fuck? I jumped up and tried to grab it, but it zoomed out of reach. Then it did a little dance, which let me know that whoever was running this thing was enjoying my situation.

  What do you do? Yell? Throw things? Good luck.

  I retreated to my condo, where the temperature change was harsh. I breathed deeply for a minute or two, trying to think what to do, then realized I had to go to the cops and report this intrusion on my privacy. But first I made a little iPhone movie of my recliner, and the sightlines onto my fenced deck, to show that I wasn’t an exhibitionist or something pervy like that.

  I met with Officer Radlett, in his early sixties like me, who asked, “Can you give me a year, make and model of the drone?”

  “What? Of course not.”

  “Welcome to the twenty-first century.”

  “That’s it?”

  “What else do you want us to do? If you were underage, I could put out a kiddie porn alert, but you’re a grown man.”

  “I—well, I thought there’d be something.”

  “Nope. Only if someone rewrote the privacy laws, and even then it’d be tough.”

  “But there’s a film of me out there doing you know what.”

  “Yes, there is.” The officer stared at me, smirking maybe just a little bit, and I knew the conversation was over.

  * * *

  —

  Imagine there’s a hi-res movie out there of you being intimate with yourself. Wouldn’t that change the way you live your day? At any moment, an intern might start to giggle as she walks past you, or the conversation might stop when you enter the lunchroom, or there could be a lone Post-it Note with a drawing of a boner on it stuck on your computer screen when you come back to your desk.

  After a few months of waiting for the video to drop, I was sitting at my desk when Troy, our obviously gay office manager, asked if he could see me for a second in the boardroom. As I followed him, I actually wasn’t thinking that this would be about the drone footage.

  Troy ushered me in, then closed the door behind us. “I’m unsure how to bring this up with you, but I think you ought to see this…”

  He opened his laptop, and I knew right away.

  There was me on my recliner, over the header “Grandpa Polar Bear Punishes His Woolly Mammoth.”

  I sat down. I mean, what do you think or say?

  Troy stopped the stream and closed his laptop. “This was a drone job. I’m guessing. Correct?”

  “Yeah.”

  “For what it’s worth, you come across totally hot.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Look, 5,802 people have viewed your clip, and it has a 93 percent approval rating. It’s kind of a miracle. Nobody likes explicit stuff with guys over forty. Seriously, nobody. Ever.”

  “This isn’t making me feel better.”

  “Just read the comments. People love you.”

  Troy flipped up his screen. The first comment: “I’d totally bottom without poppers for this nasty Santa. WOOF!!!”

  So now I wear a Speedo on the roof, but I also have a fishing net with a long handle, and I can’t wait for my next encounter.

  09

  Incel

  THIS AFTERNOON I SAT beside a drag queen on a flight to Florida and it totally rocked my world. She looked like your ginger-haired high school vice principal dressed like a Monty Python housewife, and every person at the gate wanted to know her story. So, when I sat beside the window and she came and plunked down in the middle seat to my right, I was stoked. I’d also had three vodka sodas in the airport bar and was much less socially awkward than I normally am.

  The first thing she said to me was, “Hello, kind sir, could you pass me that safety card tucked in your pocket?”

  “Sure.”

  “I always like to review the exits on any plane I’m flying on. You know, in case we fly into a building or something. What takes you to Miami?”

  “My brother’s bachelor party.”

  “Ooh! You better be careful now!”

  “I’m not expecting any of the usual stuff from him. He’s kind of a wuss. Where are you headed?”

  “A drag convention.”

  “They have drag conventions? Huh. What do you
do at them?”

  “Mostly we try to figure out ways of recruiting young straight people so we can turn them into flaming homos.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’m just fucking with you.”

  “I figured.”

  “There are a lot of people who wish we—I—didn’t exist.”

  I thought about this and said, “Me too.”

  “You? Now why would that be?”

  “I’m, uh…I’m an incel. You know how people feel about incels.”

  She laughed. “I can’t believe you just said that about yourself.”

  “It’s true. I would definitely like not to be, but I have no choice, because look at me. This is how nature made me.”

  “You—what’s your name?”

  “Ben.”

  “Ben, you could totally be fuckable, but only if you change a few things.”

  I couldn’t believe she had the balls to say that to me, even though the thought of actually being fuckable was an answer to a lifelong prayer. “Really? I mean, seriously?”

  “Sure. Tell me all about yourself, starting now.”

  The plane was taxiing. “Well, uh…some of the incel clichés are true.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like, I live in a basement and I subsist mostly on energy drinks and junk food.”

  “Have you ever been laid?”

  “I don’t know if…”

  “You’ve come this far. If you can’t tell me, then there’s nobody on earth you can tell.”

  She had a point.

  “Once. Three and a half years ago.”

  She squealed. “You, mister, you are going to be my new makeover project.”

  Truth be told, I’ve never met anyone as fun to talk to. Somewhere over an American cornfield she asked, “So, my new incel friend, are you a mass shooter just waiting to happen?”