My Busboy

  My Busboy

  By John Inman

  Robert Johnny just turned thirty, and his life is pretty much in the toilet. His writing career is on the skids. His love life is nonexistent. A stalker is driving him crazy. And his cat is a pain in the ass.

  Then Robert orders a chimichanga platter at a neighborhood restaurant, and his life changes—just like that.

  Dario Martinez isn’t having such a great existence either. He needs money for college. His shoes are falling apart. His boyfriend’s a dick. And he has a crap job as a busboy.

  Then a stranger orders a chimichanga platter, and suddenly life isn’t quite as depressing.

  But it’s the book in the busboy’s back pocket that really gets the ball rolling. For both our heroes. That and the black eye and the forgotten bowl of guacamole. Who knew true love could be so easily ignited or that the flames would spread so quickly?

  But when Robert’s stalker gets dangerous, our two heroes find a lot more to occupy their time than falling in love. Staying alive might become the new game plan.

  For Lynn S. – My #1 fan.

  Chapter One

  I TURNED away from the computer and picked up the telephone for the fourth time in the last thirty minutes. The dial tone, tinny and distant, whined in my ear. I glared at the receiver as it lay humming in my hand. A teeny voice inside my head, a voice just as whiny as the dial tone, said, “It’s going to stay lifeless until you punch in a few numbers, Robert. You know that, don’t you?”

  Of course, I knew. How stupid did my psyche think I was?

  An all-too-familiar voice not inside my head, this one just as annoying as the other, issued from the phone in my hand. “If you’d like to make a call, please hang up and try again. If you need help, hang up and then dial your operator.”

  If I need help….

  Great. Now not only my psyche, but also the minions at AT&T, knew how pathetic I was.

  I replaced the phone on the cradle and reverted my attention back to the words on the computer screen—words I had been trying to string sensibly together all evening. So far this attempt had evoked in me varying bursts of creative emotion ranging in scope from whimsical delight to puke-your-guts-up nausea. Was I forging a masterpiece with my clever wordplay, or was I mercifully slaughtering a near stillborn book with my own unrelenting incompetence and twelve-word vocabulary?

  At this point in the game, I figured it was a toss-up. My new book was at that embryonic stage where it could go either way. I could plod along, one agonizing word at a time, until I actually finished the damn thing just prior to being eligible for Social Security, or I could hit Delete right now and save it—and myself—from the misery of rejection later at the hands of my appallingly disappointed publisher. Was this manuscript missing a single chromosome to make it viable, or had an entire strand of DNA taken a powder? Was it a manuscript at all, or simply a mindless collection of brain farts trying to pass themselves off as English lit?

  My finger hovered over the Delete button. With my other hand, I reached out and picked up the phone. Again.

  I could see the numbers in my head. I could imagine my index finger punching those numbers into the phone. I could visualize my unwashed self, sitting there in my reeking, wrinkled pj’s with a carpet of three-day-old stubble on my face and smelling like a bag of rats, waiting for the call to be answered.

  That was as far as I allowed my imagination to take me. Swearing under my breath through gritted teeth, I slammed down the phone with a bang, startling my cat, Clutch, who sailed off my lap with a screech of terror, leaving claw marks in my crotch and making me wail even louder than he did.

  I popped the buttons on my pajama pants and examined my dangly parts to see if they were still intact. Deciding they were—not that I had used them much lately for anything other than waste removal—I breathed a sigh of relief. Catching a revolting whiff of unwashed flesh, I resnapped the buttons and snatched up the phone for the sixth time that evening, just to see if it still worked.

  “If you’d like to make a call, please hang up and—”

  I resisted the urge to throw the fucking thing across the room and gently eased it onto the cradle instead. Then I reached for my coffee cup. Only when I had the cup inches from my mouth did I notice the coffee was ice cold and had sprouted a fungi-like layer of crap over the top like pond scum. Not unlike what my unwashed dick had no doubt formed as well.

  My eyes wandered back to the computer screen. To the pages and pages of tripe I had vomited out through my fingertips over the last three days. I remembered an old Truman Capote quote referring to the work of the great American writer Jack Kerouac. “This isn’t writing, it’s typing,” Capote had said. Good old Tru. Ever the tactful critic. Once again my cursor hovered over the Delete button, my finger drawing closer and closer to left clicking on the mouse. At the last possible moment, I watched myself slide the cursor up the computer screen, rather like the planchette on a Ouija board, and hit Save instead.

  I’m such a coward.

  I powered down the Mac, disappointed in myself for not having the conviction to simply erase the past few days’ debacle and start over again from scratch.

  And speaking of scratch, I dug my fingers through my itchy beard, which was almost half a week past the five o’clock shadow phase. I stuck my face down my pajama shirt and took a deep sniff of unwashed flesh. My hair lay greasy on my head. My ass was numb from sitting so long. My vision was blurry. My neck ached. I had to pee. My mouth tasted like I had been lapping up the detritus from the bottom of a chicken coop. And I was hungry.

  When was the last time I had eaten? It couldn’t have been yesterday. Could it?

  To make matters worse, this was my thirtieth birthday. Yippee. And I was supposed to meet a friend for dinner. Yippee number two.

  I peeled my ass off the desk chair, popping and crackling and groaning my way upright. Not exactly a propitious sign for a man celebrating his thirtieth year on the planet. Wait. Did I say celebrating? Now there was a misapplied word if there ever was one. Christ, now even my thoughts needed editing.

  Celebrating, after all, implied fun. Having dinner with a guy who had been in love with me for years and whom I had no interest in whatsoever other than as friend material didn’t sound like a whole lot of fun to me. It sounded like another reason to hide out in my apartment for three days without bathing. But I couldn’t do that. Not to Chaz. It wasn’t his fault he was in love with me. Although you’d think a stockbroker would have more sense. I’d known the man in college. Back then he had worked in a drag show on weekends to pay his tuition. In his younger days, he had looked pretty good in a dress and heels, and he could lip-sync with the best of them. Upon graduation, he hung up his ball gowns and Joan Crawford come-fuck-me pumps and strove for the butch life, or as butch a life as any gay man can attain. To my knowledge he hadn’t donned a dress since.

  I stretched my back with a grunt while trying to properly align my body parts into a pattern that would actually allow forward momentum. Turning with a skeleton as stiff as a dead tree, I gazed over at the bookcase beside my desk. It had three shelves and stood four feet tall. The bottom two shelves were packed to overflowing with some of my favorite reads, reference books for my own writing, and the miscellaneous flotsam every voracious reader finds stuffed among his collection of tomes. The top shelf was empty but for three books. One of those three books had keeled over and flopped open as if gunned down by a drive-by shooter. It lay there on the dusty shelf looking pathetic as hell, pages splayed wide in a silent scream.

  Thinking back to the day I bought the bookcase, I had to sigh. The idea, see, was to fill that top shelf with my own writing. It was an idea that came to me when I received my first publishing contract for my very first book, which, by the way,
was the one that now lay sprawled out, face up and lifeless, like a golfer struck by lightning on the fourteenth hole. Riding a surge of optimism, which would peter out soon enough in the natural progression of time, I had thought my career was laid out as neatly and plainly as a page on Google Maps. But alas, no.

  After my third sale, the contracts for Robert Johnny, author extraordinaire, flat-out dried up. Before that happened I did manage to acquire a publishing house and an agent. I’d also garnered a goodly amount of cash, plus a loyal fan base from my first two releases. I used the money to buy a twenty-third-floor condo overlooking San Diego Bay and a vacation cabin in the desert, both of which I had snatched up for a song. My loyal fan base was no doubt withering on the vine even as I stood there in my filthy pajamas stinking up said condo. Especially since my third release was a major disappointment to all involved, and the fourth—well, the fourth was the one currently curdling to cheese inside my dumbass computer, which I was beginning to hate with every fiber in my body.

  Yes, in my desperation, not only did I hate myself, but I was also beginning to detest inanimate objects. The telephone was on that list too. As was my unwashed dick. Not that it was inanimate. Usually.

  My publisher still had high hopes for me, or so she claimed, but my own high hopes were circling the drain, about to be sucked under forever. Royalties from the first two books were still coming in, so I couldn’t complain too much. I had a fabulous place to live, plus I had managed to acquire my very own stalker, which was a dubious distinction at best, I know, but still a sign of success as far as I was concerned. He hadn’t tried to kill me yet, so I rather enjoyed his e-mails and the occasional threatening letter that came through the post. I enjoyed them in the same way one enjoys tearing out hangnails, squeezing pimples, and plucking those longass hairs that start popping out of your ears when you begin to approach middle age, but since you don’t know where the scissors are, you rip the fuckers out by the roots like weeds.

  Once, in a fit of curiosity, I tried to track down my cyberstalker by hiring a geek who lived three floors below. He was a skinny, bookish man with a pocket protector full of pens and half-glasses who advertised himself as a computer expert. He followed the trail of my stalker’s e-mails and inevitably ended up at the computers they supply at the public library for people who are either too poor, or too lazy, to purchase their own. Since the trail died a cold, miserable death right there, the geek apologized profusely, then made a pass at me. I turned him down, of course, but at least something good came out of it. I was reassured that someone out there found me attractive.

  Anyhoo….

  Interspersed with the occasional veiled promise of violence, my stalker repeatedly offered his services as a sex slave, which proved he was even more conflicted than I was. God forbid he should turn out to be a woman, by the way. Then I’d be even more conflicted than I was already.

  If my love life didn’t improve soon, I was in real trouble, because I was seriously considering taking the man (at least I hoped it was a man) up on the offer. I mean, take him up on the offer of sex, not the other stuff.

  I’m kidding, of course. All writers know the first rule in dealing with snarky reviewers and obsessed stalkers. Do Not Engage. Ever. In fact, it’s best to stay as far away from them as one can get.

  Concerning that comment I made about taking the man up on the offer of sex… let me clarify.

  In case you haven’t figured it out already, yes, I’m gay. The fact that I would consider taking up with an insane stalker who wanted to either screw me or kill me over a stockbroker who actually loved me proved that I was also certifiably insane.

  I grabbed my coffee cup and limped across my living room to dump the dregs and the pond scum into the kitchen sink. Clutch trailed along behind me, meowing plaintively—bitching actually—hoping for a few bread crumbs from the master. Or a sardine. Or a little attention. Something.

  I did him one better and popped a can of Friskies, dumped the contents in a soup bowl, and shoved it under his nose like a testy waiter. Clutch’s motor kicked in, and he went to town on it right away. One happy cat. If only my own needs could be so easily satisfied.

  Leaving Clutch to enjoy his boon, I shed my stinking pj’s and shuffled into the bathroom. Standing there naked and reeking, I cranked on the shower to heat up the water. When it no longer felt like glacial runoff, I stepped under the steaming spray and let the hot water wash away my filth—and a good deal of my depression as well, or so I hoped. I lathered up three times, washed my hair twice with peach shampoo, even used a peach conditioner, not because I liked it but because that was what happened to be sitting there on the shelf within easy reach. Squinting into the steam, with the hot water practically sizzling against my skin, I cranked out my little shower mirror from the wall and shaved the stubble off my face so I would no longer resemble an unwashed Pekingese. I brushed my teeth until my gums were raw, and just as I was about to duck under the spray for a final rinse, the water went ice cold from one second to the next. Rather than scream like a little girl and fly out of the shower before hypothermia could set in, I bit down on my lower lip and forced myself to accept that final blast of frigid water with the same stoicism and stubborn determination that a harp seal employs when he dives into the arctic seas in search of a crab dinner.

  Shivering now, but feeling clean and wide-awake, I gazed down at my naked body while the soap and shaving cream sluiced along it in the icy spray. Wow, I thought. Starvation is great. I should not eat more often. I looked thinner than I had in ages. My fuzzy tummy was pretty much tucked up against my spine, my hairy legs appeared long and lean, and my dick, well, my dick still looked the same. Weight loss doesn’t affect peckers much. Otherwise men would be gorging themselves on Dunkin’ Donuts to acquire a big fat lard-infused cock to enthrall the masses. At least I’m pretty sure I would.

  Still, my average everyday cock was nice enough, I supposed. Flaccid it wasn’t much to speak of, but when it was pointing due north and quivering in anticipation, all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and maybe drooling a little bit, it was impressive enough. Or I could safely assume so, since no one had laughed in its little purple face yet. Lately, of course, no one had been in its face at all. And wasn’t that depressing.

  I stood in front of the bathroom mirror and toweled off. Then while blasting my thick brown hair with a blow-dryer—if I let it dry by itself it goes all weird on me—I stopped twice, cut the power, and leaned out the bathroom door, thinking I had heard my phone ring. It was my imagination both times.

  I was hoping for a phone call from him, of course. My ex. Jason. The man who had dumped me almost a month earlier, abandoning what I had assumed to be a committed relationship without a backward glance. Apparently it was committed only until he met the man who stole him from me. Fucking Frank something or other. I didn’t blame Fucking Frank. How could I? Jason was a catch; even I had to admit that. A lawyer—rich and handsome as hell. No, I blamed Jason. Even so, I still hadn’t learned to hate him enough to accept the fact he was gone.

  Jason was who I had been torturing myself about calling earlier. It was because of Jason that I kept picking up the damn phone, trying to dredge up the courage to call his number, hoping to reconstruct my life. My life with him. Not that we had lived together or anything. We hadn’t. Still, it had felt like a committed relationship, or did until the prick deleted me like a bad paragraph and took up with Fucking Frank.

  Standing now in front of the bathroom mirror—hair fluffed, jaw cleanly shaved, smelling like a peach (which was annoying but still a vast improvement over what I’d smelled like earlier)—I tried to force myself to accept the inevitable. Jason was porking someone else. Period. Or to be more apt, since Jason was a lawyer, he was now delving into Fucking Frank’s briefs rather than my own.

  Maybe that’s what annoyed me most. The fact that he was having sex and I wasn’t. Maybe I wasn’t crushed that Jason had dumped me. Maybe I was simply furious he was getting more dick than me.<
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  Could I be that petty? You bet. What am I, a fucking monument to justice?

  I dumped the blow-dryer in the sink with a clatter and gave my head a shake to make my hair look properly casual and chic. When I was satisfied no other improvements would justify the effort it took to acquire them, I stepped out onto my balcony and gazed off into the distance, where I spotted a passing Navy destroyer heading out to sea. The gunwales were lined with sailors in dress whites, standing at parade rest, and every one of them looking cuter than hell. The ship barreled under the blue expanse of the Coronado Bridge and tore right down the middle of the harbor like a grande dame sweeping into a ballroom. Dragging the churned up water in her wake like the train of a gown, she headed out to sea, a final farewell blast of the ship’s horn echoing across the city.

  In the fading light of approaching night, the bay surrounding the destroyer was slate gray and as flat and smooth as marble. The wind coming off the water made me shiver as I stood there, naked but for a wet towel tucked around my waist. Dark clouds scudding landward glided across the bay’s mirrored surface. The weatherman said a storm was moving in off the Pacific and would be here by midnight. I’d believe it when I saw it. It hadn’t rained in San Diego for two months, and I couldn’t remember the last time the California sky had coughed up an actual electrical storm with honest-to-god thunder and lightning. Still, if the storm came to pass, it would be a nice distraction. Growing up in the Midwest and staking a claim for the rest of my life in Southern California, I found myself missing parts of Indiana I would never have thought I would miss. Lightning bugs, for one. Lightning storms, for another. I guess it was only the flashy, sparkly, twinkly stuff I found lacking in San Diego, which was kind of funny considering the dullass life I had led growing up in Indiana.

  I gazed left and right at the row of balconies to either side of mine. They were empty, as always. Sometimes it felt like I was the only soul in the building. Sitting on top of a quarter million downtowners as I was, it might have seemed a lonely, disconnected existence if I had actually cared about knowing other people. Which I didn’t.