Fag Hag (Robert Rodi Essentials) (28 page)

“I’m sorry to hear about that,” Natalie said, while actually reveling in his discomfort.

He waved his hand to dismiss it. “What the hell, it’s over now. And at least I’ve gotten a couple of speaking engagements out of it; they pay pretty well.”

They had come to a ramshackle commercial building that looked as though no one had rented space there since the Taft administration. “In here,” he said, opening the door to the empty retail-store space in front. “We’ve had to move around a fair amount, but the owner of this property has let me use it for next to nothing. I guess he figures even a little rent is better than none.”

The air inside was thick with dust and mold; there were about twenty folding chairs ranged around the room, with a card table set before them. Five of the chairs were filled with bedraggled, pockmarked, absolutely filthy people. Natalie could smell them from fifteen yards. She wanted to turn and run.

“Five?” Lloyd said. “Only
five?”

A few turned to look at him; only one actually greeted him. “Hiya, there, Lloyd,” he said. “Hi. It’s me, Daniel. Remember me? Daniel.” He waved and smiled; he was missing about seven teeth.

Lloyd grimaced and shook his head. “I should’ve figured. Weather’s getting cooler. Not as much incentive to come and sit someplace out of the glare of the sun.” He pulled out a chair for Natalie. “Care to sit in?”

She shrugged. “I guess.”

“Hiya, Lloyd,” said Daniel, whose age was indeterminate. He might have been twenty-five, he might’ve been sixty. “I’m back again, just like I said. It’s me, Daniel, remember?” He was waving his entire right arm now.

“Yes, of course I remember you, Daniel. Hello.”

“I brought my wife, Barbara, again,” he said, pointing to the woman next to him.

“I’m not your wife, you pervert!” the woman snarled. “And my name’s not Barbara! Get your disgusting hands away from me or I’ll call the police!”

Daniel turned away from her. He looked as if he might cry.

Lloyd rolled his eyes. “It’s not as bad as it looks,” he said under his voice. “They
do
learn. We did a unit on dehydration and heat strokes in July, and I’m convinced we saved a couple of lives. And I taught them all about safe sex; too; you’d be surprised how many of them were interested in that.”

Natalie felt a sudden longing for a hot bath. “What’s today’s topic?” she asked, wanting to get on with it.

“Nutrition. I cover that every other week; it’s that important to them. They have no idea what they should be eating. All their money goes to junk.”

Suddenly Daniel bolted up and made his way toward the door.

“Daniel, wait,” said Lloyd, blocking him with his arm. “The lesson hasn’t started yet. Where are you going?”

“I don’t have to stay here, you can’t make me stay,” he said.

Lloyd beamed with pride and murmured to Natalie, “He learned that from me!” Then he turned back and said, “Of course not, Daniel, and I’d never try to make you stay against your will. But if I ask you to,
will
you stay? We’re going to talk about food again.”

He sighed and looked straight at Lloyd. A small universe seemed to fill up the space between their eyes. “I’m pretty hungry, Lloyd,” he said.

Natalie felt the room spin. She’d never heard such despair in a human voice before; never encountered such casually expressed hopelessness. It seemed beyond endurance; she couldn’t get her mind around it. Was that what Lloyd was fighting? Her estimation of him began to rise—but she just as quickly put it down.
Don’t think about it, don’t think about anything,
she admonished herself. She looked at her shoes and emptied her mind.

Lloyd led Daniel back to his chair. “After the lesson I’ll lend you a little money and you can spend it on some dinner, okay?”

“Okay,” said Daniel, brightening a little.

“But I’m going to tell you the kinds of things I think you
should
spend it on. You make the final decision, that’s your right; but since I’m the lender I have the right to set a few terms, and my terms are that you listen to my suggestions.” He looked back at Natalie and said, “It’s important to cultivate their sense of responsibility, especially for their own welfare. That wouldn’t be possible if I bought the food
for
them, like a soup kitchen. I’m not feeding pets, I’m stimulating intelligences.”

Daniel huddled in his seat, and the woman he had introduced as his wife looked at Natalie and said, “Who’s
she?”

“That’s Natalie, a friend of mine. A visitor, just for today.”

“Is she gonna give us money, too?”

“No one’s
giving
you money, Frances. I’m
lending
it to you, remember? Someday, when you’re back on your feet, you’ll repay me.”

“What if we never get back on our feet?” asked a thin, thirtyish young man who sat with his mouth agape. He wore mismatched shoes and a dirty woolen cap.

“Never say never,” Lloyd insisted. “If you tell yourself you’re going to fail, you’ll fail.”

“Can we have our money yet?” asked Frances.

“Not yet.” He took his place behind the card table. “We’re going to have a little talk first.”

“I
WAS AMAZED
by your patience,” Natalie said later as Lloyd drove her home in his Celica. “I’d have lost my mind. You’re very good with them.”

“I treat them with respect. I’m proud of that. In every one of them, I see a potential hero. I keep thinking, if I get them to see their situations as circumstantial adversity, not as the constant condition of life, they’ll find the courage to fight it.”

“I don’t know. They seem pretty hopeless.”

He looked hurt. “You just wait. They’ve come a long way already.”

“But so many have dropped out. You said as much. There are only five left!”

“I expect the rest will be back, sooner or later, if only for the handout. And we’re bound to get some new people when winter comes. They kind of wander in and out. I mean, I’m not advertising or anything—it wouldn’t do any good. The whole thing’s been run strictly by word of mouth, right from the beginning.” He chuckled. “Boy, what I didn’t know then!”

It was getting dark, and she was feeling strangely cozy with him. “Tell me about that,” she said.

“Well, I started out pretty grandly, with a room at the Uptown Community Center, but no one even came to the first meeting. So I offered food at the second and got a capacity crowd. Then I started talking about my plans to teach the homeless self-defense—not with guns, or anything, but with makeshift weapons, things you find at hand—and the yuppies in the area practically had one big collective seizure. So I got booted from that venue. Then some of the residents banded together and hired a lawyer, and convinced a court to slap a restraining order on me; so I can’t teach anything about self-defense. I’m still pretty angry about that. It’s an infringement on my right to free speech. Even if I
were
advocating armed insurrection, which of course I’m not.

“Anyway, after that I decided that maybe what they needed was a place to keep provisions for survival in case of an emergency. So I bought some cheap lockers and rented space in another building for them, then taught them what they should keep there—bottled water, dried foods, medical kits, and so on. But anytime someone actually put something in his locker, it was immediately burglarized by someone else. You see, I’d had to give them a lesson on mnemonic devices for remembering the combinations, which resulted in about half the class walking around reciting theirs out loud—and that was that, as far as security went. But anyway, by that time most of the class was using the lockers for the most inexplicable junk I’d ever seen—old sports magazines, a collection of hair curlers, you name it. Someone had somehow cobbled together a full nativity set from cast-off pieces he’d found in dumpsters, and turned his locker into a kind of Christmas diorama. And it was mid-April.

“And then I realized that the basic principles of survivalism aren’t necessarily just a hedge against potential disaster; they’re something these people need right now, every day of their lives. So I started treating them like the emergency is already here. Which for them, it is. There’s no established order in their lives, no central authority they can appeal to; they have no means of obtaining anything they need beyond scrounging and begging—it’s like they’re already living in some post-apocalyptic scenario, even though they’re walking right beside you and me on the very same streets, in the very same town.

“I started teaching them basic nutrition and health care, and I taught them their legal rights—including the right to privacy, the whole concept of which just blew their minds; I told them what a shelter could demand, legally and ethically, from a sheltered person; in short, I tried to get each of them to think of his life as a business, as a going concern. I want them to realize that even within the most limiting circumstances, they can make choices that will better their condition. And my hope—my
expectation—
is that they someday become productive members of the community and help better the quality of
my
life. Because I firmly believe you only get out of society what you put into it. You were the one who taught me that, at that dinner a year ago.”

She felt a little thrill when he said this; he really
was
sort of enthralling when he got going—he was passionate and driven and wouldn’t even consider defeat. She gave herself a little hug of pleasure.

Then she looked at her reflection in the rearview mirror and saw the dopey smile splayed across her face, and she was shocked; shocked, because she’d almost let herself be seduced by this man, the way Peter had been seduced—charmed, like a snake, by the music of his words.

She felt her gorge rise; she thought she might be sick.

She forced herself to remember why she’d contacted him in the first place. Her ultimate objective mustn’t be allowed to wither away due to weakness.

He had turned onto Grace Street now. “Hold on,” she said; “it’s up just a few doors more—that one, there, with the porch.”

“It’s beautiful,” he said as he rolled up in front of the house. “When did you buy it?”

“Couple months ago,” she said, pulling herself together and opening the door. “I’m making good money now, and interest rates are low, so I thought,
hell.”

He nodded. “I won’t bore you with my usual spiel on the ennobling effects of private property. I’ll just say, congratulations. Peter and I would love to see it sometime.”

“As a matter of fact,” she said, standing on the curb now, bending at the waist to speak to him, “I’m having a belated housewarming party next weekend. A lot of the old crowd coming—they’re all so curious to see Peter and the four-star casanova who took him out of circulation.”

He blushed. “Well—I’m sure we’d love to come.”

“Oh, wonderful! I’m thrilled. I haven’t seen much of you guys, and I—well, you know…”

He smiled. “I know.”

She slammed the door and waved him away. He pulled into the street and drove off.

She stood looking after him, still waving, and thought,
You’re not so bad, Lloyd Hood. I hope you enjoy your last few days with Peter.

“N
ATALIE
,
YOU LOOK
absolutely
sensational!”

“Thank you, Joel, darling. Come in, come in.”

“Last time I saw you, you looked so
ill.”

“Take your jacket?”

“Thanks. I was worried about you. I mean it.”

“Beautiful leather! Love the studs.”

“Thank you. But now, you look
great.
Love your hair.”

“How sweet! I had a bad spell. Over now.”

“I should say so. You just
glowing
with health.”

“Follow me. Party’s already started.”

“Great house! You must be doing
super.”

“Fairly super, thanks.”

“That the kitchen?”

“Hm-hm.”

“It’s huge!”

“Give you the tour later. He we are. Does everyone know Joel? Joel, Kevin. Kevin, Joel. Joel, Thomas. Thomas, Joel. Joel, Brandon. Brandon, Joel.”

“Hi, Joel!”

“Hi, Joel!”

“Hey, Joel, long time, no see.”

“There’s the door again. Would someone get Joel a drink, please?”

“Natalie, can I change the music?”

“Certainly, Brandon. Compact discs are all on the shelf. Now excuse me. —Well, hello, boys!”

“Hi, Natalie!”

“Hey, Natalie—looking
good.”

“Why, thank you! Come on in.”

“What a beautiful place!”

“So glad you think so.”

“Had it long?”

“Since June. Take your jackets?

“Thanks. How many rooms?”

“Ten.”

“Ten!
Incredible.”

“Yes, it’s very spacious. Beautiful jacket! Linen?”

“Uh-huh; a gift from my guy, here.”

“Just follow me. So you two are still in love?”

“Very.”

“Very
very.”

“So happy for you both! Well, here we are. Do you know everyone? Michael, David, this is Joel. Joel, this is Michael and David. Michael, David, this is Thomas. Thomas, Michael and David. Kevin, Brandon, this is Michael and David. Michael, David, Brandon, Kevin. Brandon, I don’t recall owning any Lesley Gore CDs.”

“I brought this one with me.”

“How thoughtful. Maybe you could turn it down a notch. Oh, the door again. Someone be an angel and get drinks for Michael and David, I’ll be right back.—Kelly, darling! So glad you could come.”

“Thanks, Natalie. You look
ravishing.”

“Oh, you old flirt, come in. Take your wrap?”

“Thanks. Terrific place. You own it?”

“Me and the bank.
Fabulous
jacket. Tweed?”

“Uh-huh. Found it at a flea market, if you can believe it.”

“I can; it screams classic. Hang it up for you?”

“Thanks. I can’t get over how good you look! Last time I saw you, I thought you were ill.”

“I was, a bit; but all better. Follow me.”

“Love the couch. New?”