214 Richard Stevenson

“But why not TraveLodge? Or Days Inn? Or Holiday Inn Express?”

“Are you saying that Mrs. Van Horn’s aura possibly drifted down from the Super 8 and into this guy’s brain?”

“Maybe. Her energy field. Look, if Verizon can make speech and thoughts fly through the air and land in somebody’s head, why can’t the human brain do the same thing? It’s electrochemical after all.”

“It can’t for the simple reason that the human brain is not as well organized as Verizon.”

“Maybe some people’s brains are. Just not yours or mine.”

“Donald, you’re giving me the heebie-jeebies. You’re going all hippie on me again. I’d half expect you to turn up with flowers in your hair — if you had enough hair left to stick any flowers in.”

“At least I don’t have hair growing out of my ears, like you.”

“Ha ha.”

“Or my butt.”

“You love that I’m getting hairier. Admit it. Even as you become less so.”

“That reminds me. I want to show you what I’m told is an amazing sight.”

We walked down to the beach, asked around, and found Sean Shea, the lifeguard. When I identified myself as a friend of Hunny, Sean was plenty excited — this was a celebrity-contact-once-removed — and he agreed to show Timmy and me his tat when his break started in forty minutes.

Afterward, as we headed over to Joey and Bernie’s Take-a-Peek Inn for lunch, Timmy said, “It was a poor likeness. It looked more like Dick Cheney.”

“Yes, but that’s not the point. It is a brilliant act of defiance.

It’s that impudent, tasteless, fuck-you part of gay culture that I am afraid is going to disappear as so many of us toodle off to the altar and register our decorating choices at Georg Jensen or CoCkeyed 215

Sears. It’s why I value Hunny Van Horn even though I wouldn’t dream of living a life so rude and messy and even dangerous as his.”

“I admit, Donald, that you’re right to value the cockeyed caravan of Hunny’s style of gay life. In my head, if not in my wussy viscera, I do too. So. Are you going to get your dick tattooed?

Not an image of someone you can’t stand, like that Sean guy did, but maybe a likeness of one of your cultural heroes? Gabriel Garcia Marquez? Thelonius Monk?”

“No, I think you should go first. How about Saint Augustine?

Or the entire masthead of The New York Review of Books?”

He laughed. “Sure. I could get them all on there. Could you?”

About the AuthoR

RICHARD STEVENSON is the pseudonym of Richard Lipez, author of twelve books, including the Don Strachey private eye series. He also cowrote Grand Scam with Peter Stein, and contributed to Crimes of the Scene: A Mystery Novel Guide for the International Traveler. He is a mystery reviewer for The Washington Post and a former editorial writer for The Berkshire Eagle. Lipez’s reporting, reviews, and fiction have appeared in Newsday, the Boston Globe, The Progressive, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, and many other publications. Four Don Strachey books have been filmed by here!TV. Lipez grew up in Pennsylvania, went to college there, and served in the Peace Corps in Ethiopia from 1962–64. He is married to sculptor Joe Wheaton and lives in Becket, Massachusetts.