Michael Chabon: The Mysteries Of Pittsburgh

"Skit Night at the station tonight," said Ed, lurching to his feet. Joey remained flat on his back, his upper body a mess of décolletage, the tangled gray straps of his bra, and wadded Kleenex. "Just trying out the costumes on you'ns."

"Great costumes, fellas," I said. "Terrifying. Um-it's not ten yet, is it? I have time? Excuse me. I have to make a phone call."

I walked back out into the store, hands shaking, and up to the telephone at the front.

The phone was busy at the Bellwethers'. I tried to determine whether this was fear I felt, or anxiety. What, I asked myself, what is the big deal? They were still laughing in the back room; two customers stood nearly on the threshold, probably eyeing the doughnuts. Who was he talking to? What would I say if he answered?

Despite the several girls I had loved and made love to since my last year of high school, my childhood weakness and sexual uncertainty, all my suffering as a "fag" under the insults and heavy forearms of stronger boys, and what amounted to my infatuation with Arthur had made me an easy victim to this unintentional surprise attack by the two cross-dressed fatsos. I asked myself, in that matter-of-fact, soldierly way one asks oneself this sort of question, standing with the still-chirruping telephone in my hand, if I felt like having sex with Arthur.

"Art!" shouted Valerie, the smartest, most important, and most alarmingly thin of the women at Boardwalk. "You were just about to hang up!" She looked at me sternly; Valerie considered sternness to be the most effective managerial technique, and could deploy a tremendous battery of stern expressions, made even more effective by her long, heavy eyebrows and Afghan hound's face.

"Why, yes, Valerie, I was. Gee!" I said, quickly hanging up. "How'd you know?"

"Home Improvement," said Valeri, "now. It looks like they've been playing jai alai in it."

"Right." I grabbed a feather duster from Gil and headed back to the Home Improvement section, to make order and glittering shelves; to push around the dust until my head was thoroughly ringed with little clouds of motes and murk.

All day, as every day, I wove past customers with my arms full of books, repeating the words "Excuse me" so many times without getting a response that I began to feel genuinely inexcusable. Like the mounting evidence of a subtly evil betrayal of daily life (dead birds and telephones, the roisterous sheriff's sudden sobriety, the neighborhood children chanting in mesmeric circles in the desert schoolyard) in a movie about invasion from outer space, it seemed that every ten minutes a new reminder of homosexuality intruded into the usually eventless world of Boardwalk Books-a handsome couple of men, a copy of Our Lady of the Flowers that I'd never noticed before, a worn naked-man magazine that fell like a severed limb from inside a book on wiring and fuses. It all culminated with a little boy who came and stood beside me.

"Um, mister?" he said.

"May I help you?"

"Yeah," he said. "I'm looking for a book about makeup."

"Makeup?" I said. "As in, say, cosmetics? Health and Beauty books? You mean makeup?"

"No way!" he nearly screamed, stopping the assault, saving the earth at the last moment from complete alien domination. That wasn't what he meant at all. He meant werewolf makeup and exploding-forehead makeup. I could have fallen to my knees in thanks.

I wasn't, I insist, stupid enough to imagine that the mere fact that I had a gay friend-though I'd never, to my knowledge, had one before-meant that I was myself, somehow, a homosexual. I was, however, insecure (and stupid) enough to imagine that the only reason Arthur had befriended me was to seduce me, that he found nothing in me to admire, as I found in his manners, his intelligence, his clothing, his ease with others; in short, that he didn't really like me. If any of the attempts I made that day to telephone Arthur had succeeded, I would have asked him nothing. I would only have listened to the way in which he spoke to me, listened for accents of friendship: the banality, relaxation, and lack of style that characterize a conversation between two friends.

After their morning fun, the day, for the others, dissolved into utter antihilarity and six or seven reputedly atrocious late-afternoon hangovers. I was watching the clock slowly fold up my last ten minutes like the pleats of a fan, when an enormous BMW motorcycle, I500cc, jumped the curb outside the store and made the plate glass shake. The rider, wearing black leather chaps, black jacket, and an impenetrable black visor, dismounted without cutting the engine. The bike was so loud that Valerie and Ed and Joey came running up from the back, Valerie pressing at the headache in her temples.

He wasn't big, the biker, not tall at any rate, but he had a gut, and his boots thudded as he tore open the front door. Why couldn't you have waited eight and a half minutes? I thought. Usually the bikers went right over to the magazines, to Easyriders, and giggled at the Biker Chick of the Month for a while in the air-conditioning before stealing Hustler and swaggering out; usually they turned off their motorcycles and left their helmets hung over the sissy bar, or whatever, and did not loom at the front counter like symbols of Twentieth-Century Leather Death. I looked at Valerie, who was trying to prepare a stern look, and then turned to face the biker, who had pushed up his face shield. He wore glasses, Clark Kents.

"May I help you?" I said.

"Yes," said the biker, but he just stood and examined my face without speaking. His gaze drifted up to my hair, which seemed to check with something in his mind, and then back.

"You forgot to turn off your motorcycle, mister," I said.

"Goodness me," he said.

"May I help you?"

"I'm looking for Son of a Gangster, by Art Bechstein," he said. He smiled, big teeth.

For a moment my mind was perfectly blank; all mental activity ceased. Then I felt afraid, and in my bewilderment I opened the cash register, then closed it. I looked at the clock and was unable to interpret its message. And yet I was not at all surprised by the arrival of the Fell Biker. It was as though I'd finally been caught at a crime I had long been committing, and I thought: So.

I was being called to account for my father's sins; old scores were being settled. I decided to do whatever he said. I didn't see a gun, but I didn't have time to give the setup much careful consideration. I simply surrendered.

"Just kidnap me, okay?" I said. "It'll work. I know how my father thinks."

"Let's go," he said. He seemed reasonable. He smiled again. His front tooth was chipped.

"What is this, Art?" said Valerie.

"It's Gangland," said the biker.

"I might need a few days off," I said.

He pulled me from the register stand and dragged me out to the sidewalk. I looked back into the store and saw Valerie going to the telephone. Ed and Joey lumbered out behind us and hesitated for a moment.

"It's okay," I said. "Don't make trouble. Punch my card for me."

"Who is that guy?" said Joey. He looked more interested than ready to roll.

"I'm Death," said the biker.

"Come on, man," I said. "Let's go. I can walk."

"I can walk," he said in a squeaky voice.

Climbing onto the gigantic black saddle, I began to tremble, and clutched the hot bar behind me. I imagined being taken to some Bloomfield garage and thrown up against the grimy wall and shot. They would have to drag the Monongahela to find my riddled corpse. My father would get on the phone and plead with his bosses for an eye for an eye. My cousin Debbie would play the guitar and sing "Blackbird" or "Moonshadow" at my funeral.

We pulled out onto Forbes Avenue, and when we finally hit a red light he reached his right hand around behind him and held it out for me to shake. I shook.