Chapter 17: Dig It
Ariel Engages Gage's Gifts; Tyler Procures a Poly Proposal; Betty Gets Down to Earth
The Cozy Rooms
New Orleans, LA
Though his paternal instincts were still finding their feet, Ariel decided to reinforce a strong work ethic in Gage from the get-go.
“No free rides, kiddo!” he barked as his son slept in on his second morning at the Cozy Rooms. Having roused his bleary progeny, Ariel led his son to the Mop Room with Gage still in his underpants.
“Ain’t much to look at now, but she got heaps of potential,” Ariel apologized as he wrenched open the heavy metal door.
Gage gestured toward piles of furniture, lumber and cleaning supplies in the dusty, mildewed storage area. “You want me to tidy up?”
“We’ll do it together, and then we gotta make it over into a spic-and-span professional dungeon.”
“I don’t know much about that.”
“It wasn’t on the syllabus at Jesus U?”
Gage smiled. “No, but I’m a quick learner.”
“I did plenty of time in dungeons over the years, heaven knows, but constructing one is gonna take some innovation.”
“You got any tools?”
“Do I got tools!” Ariel gestured toward a rack of shelves burdened with drills, saws, routers, heat guns, clamps, chests of hand tools and supplies for painting, plastering, construction and plumbing. “I do most of the maintenance ‘round here myself. Just ‘cause I’m a fancy faggot don’t mean I neglect my lesbian side.”
Gage smiled uncertainly. “Isn’t that, like, a stereotype?”
“I love stereotypes ‘cause then you can surprise people.” With a sweep of his arm, Ariel cleared debris from atop a table saw. “And voila, we have a drafting area.” He pulled a clipboard from the wall and drew a rough sketch of the room’s shape. “So I’m thinking a cage here in the corner. Then a Murphy bed along the wall that folds down. A regular made-up bed will seem inviting; we’re fixin’ for forbidding. Black out the window and put in a St. Andrews Cross. Racks along the wall for torture devices and other bibs and bobs and knick-knacks.” He pointed to a depression in the cement floor, surrounding a primitive drain. “And I’m pinching myself about the drain here.”
“What you need a drain for?”
Ariel paused. “What image comes to mind when you hear the term ‘watersports’?”
“I was on the water volleyball team at college. I wasn’t any good.”
Ariel smiled indulgently. “Not a virtuoso with flying objects?”
“Not at all. And I never really understood why ‘winning’ was so, like, urgent.”
“Like father, like son.” Ariel grinned in approval, clapping a hand on Gage’s neck. “We can save the watersports curriculum for later in the semester. We wanna pull slowly outta the driveway before we hit the autobahn.” He continued sketching. “So I wanna rough in a shower up above. Nothing fancy. Industrial-like.” He drew a circle in the center of the room. “And the logical place to hang a sling is right here, but it’s gonna block traffic. I could take it down, I guess, when I need to.”
“What’s a sling?”
“A conjunction of ‘sleazy’ and ‘swing.’ For ah, congressional purposes.”
“It could come down from the ceiling,” Gage suggested. “And stay out of the way the rest of the time.”
Ariel laughed. “Like on pulleys?”
“Motorized.”
“On a winch?”
“No, a hoist. You don’t want dynamic braking when you’re lifting. You could put a little 2 HP hoist right here,” Gage advised, pointing to a nook at the base of the wall. “A quiet one. Put a switch on the wall. Run 6-mil wire through reinforced pulleys in the support columns, like here and here.”
Ariel was impressed. “The sling’s gotta support a couple of body weights. Enough for two bears, say.”
“We could support an SUV if we wanted.”
“You should see some of the bears I know.”
“Six-mil cable’s got a W.L.L. of 380 KG’s. We’ll be fine.”
“You’re showing off, you pipsqueaky little shit.” Gage giggled, blushing, as Ariel continued admiringly. “You’re a mega-geek!”
“You’re not the first to say that.”
“I’m all for it. Like I say: ‘As Geek The Nerds, So Seek The Herds.’”
“What’s that mean?”
“Today’s nerds are tomorrow’s tastemakers.”
“Omigod!” Suddenly inspired, Gage waved his hands in an excitable drying-his-fingernails manner. “We can make the hoist respond to voice commands!”
“Won’t it break the mood when Master Ariel says, ‘Hey Siri, lower the sling?’”
“Siri’s so consumer grade,” Gage pschawed, eyes alight. “I could engineer some circuitry, but to be honest a few modules on Raspberry Pi will do and they won’t cost much. We can trigger it however you want. I just wish I had my laptop,” he sighed.
“Where’d it go?” Ariel paused, a grim realization dawning. “Oh, hell. Clark?”
“Yeah. He stole it outta my hotel room. My iPad too. Think he still has it?”
“Doubtful. But he’s got a fence, and the fence still might. Lemme check.”
“Thanks, um…” Gage’s voice trailed off, an unresolved chord, as he smiled bashfully at the floor. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to call you.”
Ariel paused. “What do you want to call me?”
Gage paused shyly. “Thanks, Dad.”
Ariel started to crack a joke by reflex, but none came to mind, and the lump in his throat would have stopped it short anyway. Father and son put their arms around each other instead, grinning as they looked over the blank canvas of the dusty storage room. “It’s got lots of potential, y’know?” Gage noted, a catch in his voice. “Like us.”
“Like us.” Ariel ruffled Gage’s hair. “You can be sure of me. I just wanna say that. I’ll look after you. I’ll always have your back. And that said, I’m sure to fuck up now and then.” He grinned. “I know that I may seem perfect…”
“I’ll fuck up too.”
“Language, please. But we’ll work through it.”
“Yes please.”
“In the meantime, kiddo, we got a dungeon to manifest.”
They stood together, silent for a spell, as Ariel rubbed Gage’s neck.
“Now this is what I call father-son bonding,” Ariel finally said, giving his son a peck on the head. “Making Pinewood Derby cars together in Cub Scouts is so expected.”
Tyler’s Apartment, Upstairs
Pleasantly baked from a gummy, Tyler pored through a scrapbook while perched on three moving boxes fashioned into a chair.
Her decade at the Cozy Rooms never included time to make a home of her apartment - not even after Ariel organized the transfer of her New York possessions from the barn of a Radical Faerie who stored them through her breakdown years.
Cracking open the boxes was too painful to bear, for as Tyler realized, she only kept mementos of her successes. The “It Girl” hailed by Michael Musto in the Voice was long since a stranger. The nursing certificates praised a woman beyond resurrection.
And the camisole that was so cute from Pat Fields in the 90’s didn’t fit so great these days.
And was moldy besides from its years in the barn.
Though she didn’t need the memories, she couldn’t bear to throw them out, tucking them instead in totes and boxes and bags that stacked to the ceiling.
But she kept the scrapbooks out.
She turned a page. In the top photo, a young Tyler and Ariel flashed their legs with three grinning gay men at a toga party.
Ariel, Leo, YT, Jono, Eli. Cherry Grove, 7/4/1994.
She picked up a loose photo tucked between the pages: she was in scrubs, leaning over a gaunt young man wearing an oxygen mask, his beard coarse and unshaven. Tyler held his hand. He gazed off blankly.
She flipped the photo over. YT & Leo, 3/2/72-2/8/95. King of the Ice Palace.
She skipped a dozen pages ahead. A young man with a Jewfro navigated Perry Street, leaning on a walker.
Eli. 1971(?)-October 27, 1995.
Her fingers knew where to go next, turning another four pages.
A young man with a Mohawk arranged flowers in the morning sun, his face blooming with Kaposi’s Sarcoma lesions. Tyler saw them as purple despite the black-and-white.
Jono, September 4 1968-September 3 1996.
She closed the scrapbook and placed it beneath her altar to Marie Levau, then waved her hand to dispel the accumulated ghosts.
Tyler considered her surviving contemporaries in the 80’s-90’s downtown NYC social scene who got hitched, started families, pursued careers. Who moved on. How did those bitches dismount so gracefully?
Her phone vibrated briefly. She squinted at the cracked screen, holding her phone an arm’s length from her face.
“Funky Dejunkerz Lit Your Match on CINDER!”
Tyler’s seven-day trial for CINDER had expired fourteen days prior, triggering an outrageous $19.99 fee for monthly access to an app that catered to singles and others “burned out by online dating.” CINDER promised frisky, fetish-friendly dating possibilities in configurations generally frowned upon by the Family Research Council. While CINDER’s manifold offerings drew mercifully short of children and animals, the app allowed room for Adult Baby fetishes and Puppy Play.
Leaving those boxes unticked, Tyler made herself available to a constellation of others, including polyamory with gender options ticked “any.” The replies ranged from inscrutable to downright creepy, mostly a parade of penis pics from the elephantine to micropeni shot with a macro lens.
Bracing herself, she opened the app.
Downright refreshing, Tyler thought, peering through the cracks in her screen. The couple was attractive, and their three-quarter body shot left little room for surprise above the knee. Their openness to transwomen and racial inclusion suggested an inherent humanity; that they chose “kink-friendly” instead of “kinkster” suggested a carefree approach to sexuality rather than hedonism as a primary lifestyle (the term “kinkster” always brought “mobster” to Tyler’s mind anyway).
Most appealing was the prospect of joining their “successful business venture.” The high spirits of her youth were ground to negligibility in no small part from years of peddling coke, molly and ketamine in small quantities to a repertory of shady clients, plus wear-and-tear from whatever sketchy odd jobs crossed her path.
Tyler took a deep breath, considering that most of the problems in her past arose from letting the wrong people in.
But who could she blame but herself for feeling so fucking lonely?
A Forest in an Undisclosed Location
“Keep digging!” the cartel capitán barked at Betty, who feebly pushed her shovel in the compact forest earth.
“I can’t with these darn rocks!” Betty moaned. “Esto no bueno… for la sciatica… dos señorita.” She leaned wanly on her shovel, hoping to tease a bit of sympathy from the trio of heckling cartel goons passing a bottle in the van’s side doorway.
Her lumbar was wrecked after several jarring hours bouncing in the back of the moving van. The vehicle finally lurched to a halt after navigating a long stretch of unpaved logging road, whereupon Betty was unhooded, dragged from the back and ordered to mull over her options while digging her own grave.
As the capitán explained, Betty had two choices:
Come up with $250K for the product delivered her back in August, or
Dig the grave in which she’d be buried after being shot in the face.
“Any last request?” sneered the capitán.
“I can come up with the cash,” Betty gasped. “From my son. He’s the kingpin of one of the biggest distribution rings in New Orleans. Just let me go.”
“Why reason he pay us if we let you go? Your son need some, ah, inspiración.” He opened an enormous switchblade and mimed sawing off her hand. “Como tu mano in his mailbox.”
“Please don’t!” Betty begged. “I’m just a shy lil’ madre at the mercy of you machoso hombres. I’ll do anything you want.” She narrowed her eyes as seductively as she could muster. “Anything.”
The capitán spat tobacco juice in her face. “Take us to your son.”
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Thanks for reading!
☮️ & ❤️,
