We were merging onto the Eisenhower when this guy in a Miata blew by us on the ramp and I had to hit the brakes a little. Everyone cursed except Nancy, who was spaced out, or pretending to be. Then we got quiet and Joe said, “What kind of fag drives a Miata?”
And Tina said, “Don’t.” Tina goes to college at UIC. She was a junior, like I would have been. “Don’t say fag,” she said.
“Fag faggot fag,” Cojo said. “It’s just words. It’s got nothing to do with who anyone wants to fuck.” He took out a cigarette. He said, “This is a fag in England.” He lit the cigarette. He said, “I know fags who’ve screwed hundreds of women. I know fags who screw no one. Have a fag,” he said. He gave the cigarette to Tina and lit a second one for himself. He said, “That rapist Mike Tyson’s a fag. And my cousin Niles. He’s screwing his girlfriend even as we speak to each other here in this very car. There’s fags who like windmills and fags on skinny bicycles. I know fags who fix cars and fags who pour concrete. Regis Philbin’s a fag. Kurt Loder and that fag John Norris. Lots of TV and movie guys. Rock stars. Pretty much all of them. So what? It’s a word. It means asshole, but it’s quicker to say and more offensive cause it’s only fags who say asshole like it’s any kind of insult. Even jerk’s better than asshole. Asshole’s a fagged-out word, and fag’s offensive. And it should be offensive. I want it to be offensive. Someone calls me a Polack? I’m offended. But I’m a fucken Ukrainian, you know? I don’t give a shit about the Polish people. No offense, Krakow, but I don’t give a fuck for your people. Someone calls me Polack, though, I’ll tear his jaws off at the hinge. And cause why? Cause he’s saying I’m Polish? No. Cause he’s saying Polish people are lowlifes? No. He’s trying to offend me is why. When he’s calling me Polack, he’s calling me fag. He’s calling me asshole. So fine. You’re pretty. Okay. You smell good. You say smart things to me when you’re not telling me the right way to talk. Good news. I like you. I want to spend all my money on you. I want to take you on vacation to an island where there’s coconuts and diving. Miatas are for assholes if it makes you more comfortable. But the asshole in that Miata’s got fagged-out taste is what I’m telling you.”
Tina said, “You’ve thought about this a lot, Cojo.”
“I got a gay cousin,” he said. “A homosexual. Lenny. He fucks men, and that’s not right and it makes me sick, but that’s not why he’s a fag. He’s a fag because whenever someone calls him fag, it’s me who ends up in a fight, not him. He’s a fag because he won’t stand up for himself. Imagine: your own cousin a fag like that. That’s how it is to be me. Not just one but two fags in the family — Lenny the homofag and don’t forget about Niles the regular fag who all he does is chase girls — but I’m the only one can say it, right? About how my family’s got some fags in it, I mean. Don’t you ever bring it up to me. It’s like a big secret, and tell the truth it makes me uncomfortable to talk about, so let’s just stop talking about it, okay?”
Joe was always talking to girls about Lenny. Sometimes Lenny had cancer and sometimes he was a retard. In 1999, he was usually Albanian. But there wasn’t any Lenny. I know all Joe’s cousins. So do the Christamestas. Lenny was fiction. But I didn’t say. If he did have a cousin Lenny, and this Lenny was a gay, Cojo would defend his cousin Lenny against people who called Lenny fag. So Cojo was telling a certain kind of truth. And it never really mattered to Tina, anyway. She’d just wanted to know Joe cared what she thought of him, and the effort it took him to come up with that bullshit about fags and assholes — that made it obvious he cared. And Joe is definitely crazy for Tina. He discusses it with me. All the things he wants to buy her. Vacations on islands with sailboats and mangos, fucking her on a hammock. They’d still never fucked, but they mashed pretty often. So often it was comfortable. So comfortable they started in the backseat of the car, which was not comfortable for me, sitting next to Nancy, who’s staring at the carton of patties in her lap while the sister gets mauled. I hit as many potholes as I could. The Ike’s got thousands.
Finally we arrived at the wrong barbecue. We were supposed to go to 514 Greenway and we went to 415. It was my fault. I wrote it down wrong when Sensei Mike told us at the dojo on Friday.
But 415 was raging. Fifty, forty people. Mostly middle-aged guys wearing Oxfords and sandals. Some of them had wives, but there weren’t any babies, which always spooks me a little, a barbecue without babies. Like if you ever had a father who shaved off his mustache.
It took us a few minutes of looking around for Sensei Mike before we noticed this banner hanging off the fence. It said HAPPY TENURE, PROFESSOR SCHINKl! By then, we all had bottles of beer in our hands. The beers tasted yeasty. They were from Belgium. That’s what set the whole thing off.
The four of us were half-sitting along the edge of the patio table, trying to decide if it was more polite to finish the beers there or take them with us to look for Sensei Mike’s house, when this guy came up and made a show of adjusting his sunglasses. First he just lowered them down the bridge of his nose so we could see one of his eyebrows raise up. But then he was squinting at us over the frames and he had a hand on his hip. He stayed that way for a couple of wheezy breaths, then tore the sunglasses off his face with the other hand and held them up in the air behind his ear like he was gonna swat us. Instead, he let the shades dangle and he said, “Hmmmmmm.” The sound of that got the attention of some other people. They weren’t crowding up or anything, but they were looking at us.
The guy said, “Hmmmmmm” again, but with more irritation than the first time. Like a whining, almost.
“How you doing?” Cojo said to him. Nancy leaned into me, but it was instinct, nothing to make a big deal of. Tina held her beer close. Cojo was smiling, which is not a good thing for him to do around people who don’t know him. His smile looks like he’s asking you to stop making him smile. It’s got no joy. It’s because of his smile that I retrieve the cars when we work the lot together. If customers tip, it’s usually on the way out.
Real slow and loud, the guy said, “How’s. your Belgian. beer?”
So the beer was his and he was attached to it in some sick way. Like fathers and the end-piece of the roast beef. He wasn’t anyone’s father, though, this guy. He was being a real prick about the beer is what he was, but it was the wrong barbecue and he was harmless so far. He was tofu in khakis. About as rough as a high school drama teacher. Still, he could’ve been Schinkl for all we knew, so he didn’t get hit.
“You want one?” Cojo said. He said, “I think there’s one left in the cooler by the grill.”
The guy stared at Joe, just to let him know that he’d heard what Joe said but was ignoring him. Then he spun on Nancy. He said, “Is that ground chuck in your lap, young lady? Do you mean to wash down those patties of ground chuck with my imported. Belgian. beer?” He poked the meat.
I said, “Hey.”
“Hay’s for horses,” he said, the fucken creep.
A woman in the crowd — they were crowding up now — said, “Calm down, Byron.”
He poked the meat again, hard. Busted a hole in the plastic wrap. Nancy flinched and I had that fucker in an armlock before the meat hit the ground. Joe dumped out his beer and broke the bottle on the table edge. We moved in front of the Christamestas, like shields. I had Byron bent in front of me, huffing and puffing.