“I understand that the big cartels are vicious, but I’m surprised about the mid-level people. Especially with weed, that benign product that in any sane society would be available at Stop & Shop. It’s not coke or heroin, or crystal meth, which makes users crazy.”

“Ron Paul has the right idea. Just legalize it all and let people make their own choices.”

“It’s a shame,” I said, “that Ron also appears to believe that people should be left alone to take out their own tonsils and build their own roads.”

“Anyway, Eddie had moved on. That was good. He wasn’t about to devote his life to futzing around with the drug cartels. Not that this new project he was working on was going to set the publishing world on fire. I certainly wasn’t going to be setting up any auctions on that one. I have to say, I told him it was going to be borrring. But Eddie had this hair up his ass on gay media, and as usual he had his reasons, and I was basically instructed to get with the program, that that was the way it was going to be.”

“Gay media? A book on gay media?”

She popped another Necco wafer, a brown one this time. “Eddie had some filmmaker friends who’d been screwed by a gay TV network, Hey Look Media. Skeevy people run it who are cynical and cheap. They treat their own employees like crap, and they don’t pay people who do contract work for them. Half the writers and filmmakers in New York and LA are suing HLM for money owed. Eddie started hearing all these ugly stories about the company, and he thought, oh, well, maybe he’d do a magazine piece about these skuzzy creeps. I mean, is this what gay culture in America has come to? But then he found out that HLM itself had bought up most of the major organs of the gay press, both print and online, and of course no editor is going to do a story on how rotten their own bosses are.”

“I’ve seen some of Hey Look’s programming. It’s mostly pretty shoddy.”

“Shoddy and dumb. And the other gay network, Brand Gay, isn’t much better. You’d never know from these two channels that some of the smartest and most creative people in the country are gay. It’s all just so…lame. Clunky gay vampire series, cheesy private eye movies that look like they were made for about a dollar-eighty-five, and reality shows featuring supposedly glamorous gay men who have bronze asses, tiny IQs and the emotional development of eleven-year-old girls.”

“Timothy Callahan, my beau, and I tuned in a few times. Somebody told us a few of these shows were a guilty pleasure. But whenever we looked, we experienced neither guilt nor pleasure, and we quit watching.”

“Then,” Beers said, “after his approaches to gay magazines didn’t pan out, Eddie thought maybe he could do a piece on this sorry state of affairs in gay America for The New York Times magazine. He thought it was that important as a social phenomenon. He talked to an editor at The Times who’s gay, and this gal, Gerri Anastos—I’ve known her for years—was interested. The more Eddie dug, though, the more he began to think he had the material for a big book on the subject. His idea was, he’d do the Times piece and live off that and the proceeds from his modest Globe buy-out while he finished what he saw as a major expose of the gay mediocrities and opportunists and scammers who’ve moved in in the wake of gay liberation.”

I said, “This sounds interesting. It’s a book I’d read. But you said you thought it would be boring. How come?”

“No, you wouldn’t be bored, and neither would I, and neither would several hundred other people. But the larger market? Who really cares about a specifically gay culture anymore? And maybe the market is right. Except in Gum Stump, P-A, we’re so assimilated now that we may not need our own magazines and TV channels. We’re on the sitcoms and Showtime and HBO and in the mainstream press. Every time you turn on an awards show, the winners are all up on the stage waving their trophies and tongue-kissing their same-sex boyfriends and girlfriends in America’s face while America shrugs or says oh isn’t that nice, sissies and dykes can be so adorable. And the mainstream gay stuff is generally so superior to the gay-channel gay stuff that what’s the point, really, in having our own separate news and entertainment venues?”

“Did Wenske have a contract for the gay media book?”

“A couple of university presses said they’d look at it. I told him he’d better be prepared to take another newspaper job, because this book was going to bring in pretty close to zilch in the way of an advance. I’ve got Mister New Rochelle Root Canal, but Eddie never had the good sense to marry and divorce a dentist. Which of course in gay old Massachusetts he could easily have done.”

“It sounds as if he was as emotionally wrapped up in this project as he’d been with the pot book.”

“Maybe even more so,” Beers said. “He was outraged that gay people could set up a business aimed at gay customers and then fuck over the gay people they’d hired to produce what they were selling. It seemed to Eddie like a betrayal of the cause of gay social progress. He seemed to expect gay tycoons to be more honest and more humane than straight tycoons. That struck me as naive, and still does, but this innocence is one of the things I find so appealing about Eddie. I may sound like a cynic, but in current-day conglomerate-dominated publishing I’ve seen plenty to be cynical about. My dear, Alfred and Blanche Knopf are looonnngg in their graves, believe me.”

“Straight or gay, I think we can consider all con artists objectionable.”

“In his pitch to The Times, Eddie compared the Hey Look owners to the black poverty pimps who showed up in the wake of the civil rights movement. First it’s the selfless visionaries who push history ahead in some fine way, and then the exploiters and hustlers move in. It happened in the sixties with black civil rights, and it happened more recently with gay liberation. Of course this all struck a chord with Eddie, because he saw gay social progress as his movement. He took what had happened to the mistreated filmmakers personally.”

Was Beers missing something here? I said, “If Wenske was researching the gay media book when he vanished, why couldn’t his disappearance have had something to do with that instead of the marijuana book?”

Beers gave me her boy-is-this-bozo-dumb look and reached for another Necco wafer. “Just read the goddamn weed book, will you, please?”

CHAPTER TWO

“My thinking when I left the city,” I told Timmy, “was that Wenske’s disappearance might have had something to do with the book he was working on at the time, this gay media book. The controversial marijuana book was behind him by then, and according to Marva Beers he was considerably worked up over all the jerks and sociopaths he’d been hearing about in gay TV and magazines. But then I read Weed Wars on the train, and I saw why Beers was sure of a connection between the pot book and his going missing. You should read it. We think of pot as so innocuous, and of course the stuff itself is—sweet and companionable and harmless when not over-indulged-in. But the business of producing and marketing weed is not so mellow. It’s cut-throat, and I mean in the literal sense. Anybody who cheats or steals or screws up or even just competes too assertively can end up in a shallow grave in the woods somewhere. Knowing this, I don’t think I’ll ever toke again so casually.”

“You hardly ever do, anyway,” Timmy said. “Your primary drug of choice has been Sam Adams almost as long as I’ve known you. Sam Adams and green curry.”

“And both are especially satisfying tonight after the micro-waved hot dog I had for lunch on AMTRAK.”