Michael Chabon

I winced inwardly, though Ed and Joey always called me this; for the first time I took it half-seriously, as though my friendship with Arthur made me gay by association. Of course, I reminded myself, they didn’t mean homosexual, exactly; what they meant was: you thin, weak kid whom we could completely crush under our tremendous butts or dismember with very little exertion. I laughed.

“Ha ha,” I said. “What is this? Some Like It Fat?”

“Ha ha,” said everyone in the room. These included, in addition to the pair of giant future paramedics: three chainsmoking, bulimic young women who occupied various higher levels in the byzantine Boardwalk management hierarchy; Rodney, a tall, quiet black man who had gone to jail for evading the Vietnam draft, and who was now in the process of converting to Catholicism, with the eventual aspiration of becoming a Trappist monk, “like Thomas Merton,” who, as Rodney often told me, died in a terrible and ridiculous fashion; and Calvin, another budding paramedic, a fan of knives and small firearms, and Gil Frick’s only friend at work—one friend more than I had myself. These people sold books in the shadow of the University of Pittsburgh.

“Skit Night at the station tonight,” said Ed, lurching to his feet. Joey remained flat on his back, his upper body a mess of décolletage, the tangled gray straps of his bra, and wadded Kleenex. “Just trying out the costumes on you’ns.”

“Great costumes, fellas,” I said. “Terrifying. Um—it’s not ten yet, is it? I have time? Excuse me. I have to make a phone call.”

I walked back out into the store, hands shaking, and up to the telephone at the front.

The phone was busy at the Bellwethers’. I tried to determine whether this was fear I felt, or anxiety. What, I asked myself, what is the big deal? They were still laughing in the back room; two customers stood nearly on the threshold, probably eyeing the doughnuts. Who was he talking to? What would I say if he answered?

Despite the several girls I had loved and made love to since my last year of high school, my childhood weakness and sexual uncertainty, all my suffering as a “fag” under the insults and heavy forearms of stronger boys, and what amounted to my infatuation with Arthur had made me an easy victim to this unintentional surprise attack by the two cross-dressed fatsos. I asked myself, in that matter-of-fact, soldierly way one asks oneself this sort of question, standing with the still-chirruping telephone in my hand, if I felt like having sex with Arthur.

“Art!” shouted Valerie, the smartest, most important, and most alarmingly thin of the women at Boardwalk. “You were just about to hang up!” She looked at me sternly; Valerie considered sternness to be the most effective managerial technique, and could deploy a tremendous battery of stern expressions, made even more effective by her long, heavy eyebrows and Afghan hound’s face.

“Why, yes, Valerie, I was. Gee!” I said, quickly hanging up. “How’d you know?”

“Home Improvement,” said Valeri, “now. It looks like they’ve been playing jai alai in it.”

“Right.” I grabbed a feather duster from Gil and headed back to the Home Improvement section, to make order and glittering shelves; to push around the dust until my head was thoroughly ringed with little clouds of motes and murk.

All day, as every day, I wove past customers with my arms full of books, repeating the words “Excuse me” so many times without getting a response that I began to feel genuinely inexcusable. Like the mounting evidence of a subtly evil betrayal of daily life (dead birds and telephones, the roisterous sheriff’s sudden sobriety, the neighborhood children chanting in mesmeric circles in the desert schoolyard) in a movie about invasion from outer space, it seemed that every ten minutes a new reminder of homosexuality intruded into the usually eventless world of Boardwalk Books—a handsome couple of men, a copy of Our Lady of the Flowers that I’d never noticed before, a worn naked-man magazine that fell like a severed limb from inside a book on wiring and fuses. It all culminated with a little boy who came and stood beside me.

“Um, mister?” he said.

“May I help you?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I’m looking for a book about makeup.”

“Makeup?” I said. “As in, say, cosmetics? Health and Beauty books? You mean makeup?”

“No way!” he nearly screamed, stopping the assault, saving the earth at the last moment from complete alien domination. That wasn’t what he meant at all. He meant werewolf makeup and exploding-forehead makeup. I could have fallen to my knees in thanks.