"Well... not directly. The most likely scenario is that he pleas guilty to the lewd conduct charge in exchange for fifty or sixty hours of community service — deferred until after the tour, of course — and the stipulation that he not have to register as a sex offender. He's already back home. They booked him and then released him on his own recognizance."
"Okay," Jake said. "That doesn't sound so bad."
"Uh... yeah... well... I haven't actually told you the bad part yet."
"What do you mean?"
"Bobbi, the prostitute, was dressed in a really slick leather mini-skirt and had a really fantastic set of knockers — from what I'm told anyway — but... uh... Bobbi's actual name is not Roberta, as you might think, but... uh... Roberto."
Jake took an extra-long, extra-deep drag from his smoke and blew it out slowly. "Roberto?" he finally said.
"Yeah," Pauline said. "Roberto apparently looked pretty hot, but she... he... is actually an outtie, not an innie."
"Wow," Jake said as he let that sink in. Sure, Charlie was weird, and he had made some... well... disturbing remarks in the past, but... Roberto? "Did Charlie know this... uh... chick was a guy?"
"He says he didn't," Pauline replied. "He told me he just likes to go out and score the occasional blowjob from a street hooker and he had no idea that drag queens did their business over by Macarthur Park."
"Did he seem upset by the fact that a dude was sucking his dick?" Jake asked. Jake could imagine how he would feel in such a circumstance. He was a live and let live kind of guy and if two dudes wanted to slurp each other's schlongs, it was no skin off his ass, but the thought of letting another person with the Y-chromosome put his mouth on him... and to do it by misconception, that was just wrong on every level.
"He seemed kind of dazed by the whole thing," Pauline said. "I only talked to him on the phone and it was kind of hard to get a read."
"Hmm," Jake said, shaking his head and feeling vaguely nauseous. He took a few sips of beer to help quell the sensation. "What are the odds that the media won't get hold of this?"
"Zero in a million," she said. "They already know about it, probably from contacts in the LAPD. Bobbi's booking photo and rap sheet have already been released to the press along with all the sordid details. It'll be on all the news channels and in most of the newspapers first thing in the morning."
"Jesus," Jake said. "What a mess."
"Yeah," Pauline said. "Charlie's gonna be a laughing stock no matter what, even if people do believe it was a simple case of mistaken identity."
The story about Charlie and the drag queen was indeed in all the newspapers and on all the television news programs the next morning. On the Channel 5 morning newscast it was actually the top story. Through Pauline, Charlie had released a brief statement to the effect that he was not a homosexual and that he had not known that the prostitute he was consorting with was a male (pictures of Roberto Martinez did lend credence to this statement — he really did make a pretty cute-looking chick), and that he was embarrassed and angry about the entire situation. Charlie granted no interviews and made no appearances before any cameras.
Charlie did, in fact, seem quite mortified by the whole situation when he showed up at the rehearsal warehouse the next morning. "Hey, guys," he greeted, his face flushed, his eyes downcast. "I guess you heard about what happened?"
"Yeah, we heard," Jake said and then was unable to think of a single thing to follow that statement up with. What the hell were you supposed to say to a guy when something like that happened to him? There wasn't really an entry in the Guy Handbook that covered this situation.
Coop, Nerdly, and most of the road crew who were helping produce the show were somewhat at a loss for words as well. A lot of the roadies flat-out avoided Charlie and then whispered things behind his back. Everyone seemed to go out of their way to avoid actually touching him. Only Matt treated him exactly the same, which was to say he didn't talk to him in any way unless he absolutely had to.
"Do you really think he didn't know it was a guy?" Coop asked Jake as they ate their sandwiches during their lunch break (Charlie was in the bathroom, washing his hands for the fifteenth or twentieth time at this particular moment).
"I think, for my own sanity, I'm going to have to force myself to believe him," Jake said.
"That's a good way to look at it," Coop had to admit.
Matt just shook his head. "He's a fuckin' fudge packer," he said. "There ain't no way in hell he didn't know it was a dude. You don't go to fucking Macarthur Park unless you're looking for some shit like that."
Matt's opinion on the matter was shared by about three-quarters of the road crew. After all, they knew Charlie, had worked closely with him through three tours now, and the thought of him specifically going out looking for a transvestite didn't seem that far off-base. As for the public, though they did indeed make a laughing stock out of Charlie by the end of that first day, the general consensus seemed to be that were giving him the benefit of the doubt. No one really believed that a member of the raunchiest band in history — the band that was infamous for the coke in the butt-crack episode and the notorious sex and drug orgies described in the news reports of their New York City arrest — could possibly be gay.
That benefit of the doubt shifted on its axis two days later, however, when Bobbi Martinez — now the most famous transsexual on the planet — held a press conference outside the Los Angeles City Jail (he had not been released on his own recognizance at the time of arrest due to multiple previous convictions and two outstanding failure to appear warrants). There, dressed fashionably in a pair of hot pants and a tube top, he told the world that Charlie Meyer had known very well that he was actually a guy because the night they had been arrested was not their first time together.
"I've been with him dozens of times," he said. "He asks for me by name when he's out cruising for some action, and what I got caught doing to him, he's done to me more than once. He knew what was under that dress."
Charlie, both in person and in a press conference of his own, emphatically denied that he had ever seen Bobbi Martinez before that night and that he'd ever knowingly engaged in any sort of sexual activity with a male. "Look," he said, "Something embarrassing and revolting happened to me because I was doing something that I really shouldn't have been doing. I've learned my lesson and I'd just like to put it all behind me now. I believe that this Bobbi character is simply trying to cash in on the circumstances and keep his fifteen minutes of fame going and maybe try to score a little money from my misfortune."
Public opinion swung sharply against Charlie for a few days. Despite his denials, people were willing to believe the transvestite hooker when he said Charlie was a repeat customer. It swung back in the other direction a little bit when, two days later, it was revealed that Bobbi Martinez had agreed to do a photo shoot and a complete expose on his activities with Charlie Meyer for one of the raunchier pornographic magazines. In return for this, Martinez was to be paid sixty thousand dollars.
"As I've been saying all along," Charlie said in a prepared statement released through Pauline, "this Martinez person is making this all up so he can profit from the circumstances. I find this all very disturbing."
He was not the only one who found it disturbing. Matt pulled Jake aside shortly after Martinez's first press conference and tried to get him to fire Charlie again.
"He's a fuckin' faggot," Matt said. "We've always suspected that, and now we have fuckin' confirmation. And not only that, the whole fuckin' world knows he's a faggot now. If we go out on tour with a confirmed faggot, people are gonna start thinking we're faggots too. Let's get Darren back in here, Jake. It'll delay the tour by a month or so, but we won't have people thinking were all a bunch of fudge packers out there and it'll ease some of the tension we've been dealing with ever since Freakboy started playing with us."