Fiction
He called himself Pi, and his profile was darling.
Your favorite cutie Pi! was his tagline. No NSFW pics either, just his rosy cheeks and too-big smile. It looked like the world had never hurt him. Never touched him.
His color was pink: pink nails, pink lipstick, pink fishnet tights and mesh shirts and streaks in his platinum bottle-blonde hair. His whole aura was pink.
Richard finished dinner and drinks with his colleagues at ten. He normally wouldn’t allow himself the luxury of a cutie like Pi, but he was five Manhattans deep and morbidly curious about how such a lovely little specimen was surviving in the rural outskirts of Cincinnati. After a dinner full of golf talk and fishing accolades and reminiscing over the good ol’ days, Richard needed dessert.
A little slice of Pi.
He arrived in a cloud of cupcake perfume, bearing a bottle of grocery-store rosé and kissing Richard on both cheeks like they were long lost friends, or French, or something other than a Grindr hookup. Was this how they did it in Ohio? Had Richard used the wrong app?
“I like cuddles, so you’ve gotta give me at least twenty minutes before you give me the boot, ok?” Pi said, uncorking the syrupy sweet wine with a flourish and doling out two heavy pours into the smudged hotel cups.
“I can manage that,” Richard chuckled.
In truth, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d even made it as far as the bed with a guy from an app. He was usually decent enough to toss a cushion on the floor for them. Maybe it was just the Midwest—they always had better manners.
Whatever. He didn’t fly out until the next afternoon. He could cope with some company.
And what company Pi was.
“Ooh, I love a little hair,” he exclaimed when Richard unbuttoned his shirt, combing his fingers through the wiry salt-and-pepper patch growing underneath. Pi was remarkably tactile—poking at Richard’s moles, flicking his belly button, tugging his ear lobes and gasping with delight when he saw the piercing hiding on the right side. Before Richard knew what had happened, one of Pi’s dangly pink beaded earrings was hanging there, some miracle of flesh preventing the hole from having closed after a near-twenty-year hiatus.
The surprises didn’t stop there; Richard wasn’t used to kissing, or caressing, or the way Pi would grab his hands and put them where he wanted, refusing to let Richard grip and push where instead he could stroke and fondle. What was usually a simple and efficient transaction was transformed into an experience.
Richard couldn’t say he minded, though the familiar edge of shame began to ride his shoulders as things wore on—Pi’s skin was soft, and his sounds were melodic, and when he snuggled up against Richard afterward and sighed, it was a sound of such contentment. Richard lay his head on the smaller man’s shoulder and let himself imagine, for just a few minutes, that this was his life.
Stillness didn’t seem to be Pi’s strong suit, however. After his required twenty minutes of cuddling had elapsed, he sprang up, downed his glass of rosé, then Richard’s, then clapped his hands together and said, “I want to go dancing.”
Richard couldn’t help it—he laughed.
“What’s so funny?” Pi said.
“No way there’s a gay bar in a Cincinnati suburb.”
“Who said we need a gay bar?” Pi shot back.
Richard gave him a look.
Pi blinked, pink sparkles shimmering in the corners of his eyes.
“Do you really need me to explain?” Richard asked.
“The times are a-changin’, old man.” Pi booped him on the nose. “Come dancing.”
Richard meant to say no. He did. A treat like some Pi after dinner was more than enough. He didn’t do dancing. He didn’t do bars.
But his hotel was walking distance from some dive, and twenty minutes later, his personal manic pixie dream boy was hauling him by the hand up to a thoroughly inked bouncer, bopping his head to the bassline bumping inside.
There was an alley off to the right—the smell of trash, murky puddles, rough cinderblock walls. The kind that tore skin and clothes.
Richard took Pi’s earring from his ear and pocketed it.
When he handed his ID over, Richard noticed Pi’s nails—pink, of course—ringed by matching pink cuticles. Not the cute kind of pink though—the chapped, raw kind, from over-washing. The kind that people in food service got, that couldn’t be soothed away with sparkly scented lotion.
Richard didn’t like thinking of Pi working a real job.
When the bouncer asked for his ID, Richard gave him a look—the hair plugs were good, but not that good.
The moment they were through the door, Pi was off like a shot.
Richard had to pause as a wave of nausea hit him. He wasn’t sure what it was that yanked him back in time—the nineties hits, or the cigarette smoke, or the flickering yellow lights over the billiards tables in the far corner. Maybe the drawers full of pull-tab lotto tickets, or the sawdust on the floor, or the way that cigarette leg jeans and neon windbreakers seemed to unironically be back in fashion now.
Whatever it was, the moment swallowed him. For just a moment, he was back, he was there, he was Rich again. He was searching the room, evaluating the crowd, the smells, the foot traffic to the counter, the hallway, the eyes that lingered too long.
The bar definitely wasn’t out-and-proud—there was a group of bikers playing pool, and the usual denim-clad barflies bellied up by the taps. Most tables and booths were taken—dates, coworkers, Friday night with the boys.
It was crowded. It was noisy. It was a lot.
The sight of Pi on the dance floor yanked Richard back to the present moment—of course Pi had found some group out on a girls’ night. Of course he was in the middle of them, shaking his ass without a fucking care. Of course he was effervescent, fizzy and fun.
Richard’s vision went tunnelly, and he headed for the bar, falling onto one of the stools and hearing the order for a triple-whiskey like it was spoken by another man. He kept his eyes forward, on the plastic cup that appeared before him. Too much ice.
He didn’t look around. He didn’t search for earrings in right ears. He didn’t watch the sway of anybody’s hips, the hands grazing the small of somebody’s back, the cherry-vodka whispers with invitations to the darker corners of the bar’s rear hallway.
He didn’t. He didn’t need to. There was an app for that now. A world with open doors. Brightly lit. Out.
“Hey, Grumpus!” Pi was suddenly there, arms around Richard’s neck, cupcake perfume dousing him in a sugar-sweet sickness. “Gonna buy me a drink?”
Richard went stiff.
Pi noticed, and stepped back.
Richard couldn’t help it—he looked around. One of the bikers had seen. A guy at a booth with a bunch of other dudes was watching too—the hungry kind of watching, like Richard used to do.
“Really?” Pi said.
Richard couldn’t look at him. “I grew up in a different generation, kid.”
He sucked his cup down to the ice, and then the song changed, and bam, he was Rich again: 1993, a bar so like this one he wondered if the universe had folded itself over and laid it down atop him.
A guy brushed past, just a little closer than necessary, even with the crowd. He smelled of poppers and sweat.
Rich watched him.
The kid was nondescript—mustache, tight shirt, hooked nose. A left-side hanger, with jeans belted so high and tight he might as well have put it on a billboard.
Rich didn’t remember getting up. Only following the slim thing down the hallway, to the bathroom. Grimy as grimy could be, graffiti everywhere, the false floral scent of a gel air purifier. Seven steps to the back stall. Broken latch on the cheap aluminum door. Laughing eyes and a lovely lisp and startled stuttering breaths when hips met hips and back met wall.
The bathroom door, bursting open before Rich ever got a taste.
The drenching wave of panic—the same one that had woken him from countless night terrors in the decades since.
Rich flew backward, a magnet repelled from his conquest of just a moment before.
A man entered the bathroom. Checkered shirt, no sleeves. Stained jeans.
Hairy. Sweaty. Straight.
From his narrowed eyes and furrowed brow, Rich could tell, full of hate.
What followed was a split-second decision.
Self-preservation, one therapist had called it.
They both knew what it really was.
Cowardice.
“Fuckin’ faggot made a pass at me,” Rich sneered.
His knee was buried in the kid’s balls a second later. His punch sent the poor boy flying into the wall.
It hurt—Rich had never punched somebody before. He wasn’t the kind of person who threw punches. He heard a distinct crunch as his thumb was crushed in his fist.
He thought, Ow.
The kid moaned from the ground. Rich figured that would be enough. The man would piss, be on his way. Rich would help the kid up. Apologize. You know how it is, though the kid didn’t, he couldn’t, because he looked like that and Rich looked like this.
In Rich’s worst nightmares, he was outed. Ridiculed. Ostracized.
He never worried about violence though. It was 1993. Times were changing.
And yet, there he was. Changing them right the fuck back.
The man didn’t leave.
He came over, to stand at Rich’s side, looming over the poor boy curled on the dirty bathroom floor.
“Let me get my buds,” he said, voice gruff.
He got his buds.
Richard’s brain did a lot of things to prevent him from properly remembering what came next.
There were some parts he couldn’t get out of his head, no matter how hard he tried: the laughter of one of the men—some choking, piggish sound. The smell of garbage in the alley. His migraine in the hospital afterward, squinting under flickering fluorescent lights. Terrified the kid would rat on him; terrified the kid would die. Wishing his skull would actually split open and relieve him of the need to survive the hours that followed.
There were other parts he couldn’t remember, though. Like whether or not he’d hit the kid again after those first two blows. What his name was—Richard knew he’d heard it, but for the life of him, he couldn’t recall.
How he’d gotten home.
Because, at some point, he had. Rich had gone home, and slipped into bed, and woken up the next day, and continued with his life.
The boy must have continued with his life as well, but it was a different life than the one he’d had before Rich came along.
Rich’s life was different too.
It felt wrong to draw such a comparison, but it was true.
An inflection point for them both, horrid in uniquely different ways.
“Look, I’m gonna give you one more chance to treat me like the snack I am, then I’m gone, mmk? I am far too cute for the dive bar brush-off.”
Richard landed back in the present in a properly pink haze. Pi was right up against him, obvious and open. He waited expectantly for some grand gesture of apology in the aftermath of his ultimatum, lashes powdery with pearly pink shadow.
“Let’s go,” Richard grunted, taking Pi’s petite hand in his and dragging him to the bathroom. He practically fell down the narrow bar hallway, back into his past.
“Ooh, round two?” Pi squealed behind him.
Richard was drunk—his body seemed to be moving before he ordered it to, his movements bigger than he intended for them to be, his mind like a broken record stuck back in ’93, stuck in that bathroom, stuck on that boy.
The layout was the same of course—foggy mirror, aluminum stall door, graffiti everywhere: love is dead, so is my liver—call ur ex—this is where your tax dollars go.
Gravity seemed to reorient itself around the spot on the floor where the boy had lain all those years before. Richard fell to his knees there.
“You good?” Pi asked.
“Hit me,” Richard said.
Pi tittered out an awkward laugh. “Look, I’m as kinky as the next guy, but—”
“Hit me.”
Pi’s lips pressed shut. Richard watched the light leave him, the magic that had kept him floating off the ground all night long.
Of course Richard had taken that from him. Of course he was ruining something else. Something pure and beautiful and better.
This was why he shouldn’t have Grindr. Why he shouldn’t allow himself indulgences like Pi. He didn’t deserve that. Couldn’t even manage something as simple as a hookup without making it the Poor Richard show. He was the bad guy. He was the villain. Him him him.
Pi was different in the dim bathroom lighting, without his magic illuminating him from within. He was small, and tired. He had smile lines that showed through his foundation. Stubble too. When his eyes weren’t twinkling, they were muddy brown.
“I hurt a boy like you once,” Richard said. “In a bar like this. A long time ago. We were about to fuck, but somebody walked in, and it was hit or be hit, so I hit. That’s the kind of person I am, Pi. Doesn’t that make you want to hit me? Don’t you want to make it even?”
“Not really,” Pi said, voice soft.
Richard sagged. Of course Pi didn’t want to hit him. Why would he? Richard’s past was his to bear. None of it was Pi’s responsibility.
“Sorry,” Richard’s voice cracked as the adrenaline transmuted to shame. “I just—you can go. I’m sorry.”
He was crying then, like a fucking mess. He knew he’d probably throw up too—he’d had enough to drink, and the misery would tip him the rest of the way. Pi didn’t need to be there to see that. He hadn’t signed up for this, when he’d answered Richard’s opening message—a flirty wink and the address of the hotel. A promise of no-strings fun.
Nothing about this was fun.
Pi sighed. He put his back against the cheap aluminum partition and slid to sit on the floor across from Richard.
“Go,” Richard choked, swiping at his cheeks. “I don’t want your pity. I’m sorry. Just go.”
“I’m not going to do that,” Pi said, voice still lethally soft.
“You don’t have to play therapist.”
“I’m not going to do that either,” Pi said.
“Then what?” Richard snapped. “What do you want from me? I know I’m despicable. Just leave. Go.”
“No,” Pi said.
That’s when Richard threw up, of course. The cocktails he’d consumed, curdled with Pi’s cupcake scent and his coiled shame.
He sweat through his shirt, the toilet seat sticky on his cheek where he rested his head between bouts.
Pi didn’t move.
He didn’t come closer, didn’t offer to get water, didn’t rub Richard’s back in soothing circles or tell him it would be ok, that this would pass. He didn’t lie to him and tell him he wasn’t a horrible person.
He didn’t leave.
“Why are you still here?” Richard asked, a tremor in his voice after he spat the last of the acrid bile into the toilet bowl.
Pi picked at his chapped cuticles, taking a good long while to answer.
“You don’t get a pass for doing evil shit. But you don’t suffer alone.”
“I deserve to,” Richard said.
“Yeah, maybe,” Pi agreed.
Somebody came in and pissed in the urinal, not washing their hands before exiting again, the music from the bar growing louder for the few seconds the door was open.
Another nineties hit.
The past folded over again, some wrinkle in the memory ironing itself smooth.
Outside the hospital. Shivering in the cold. Watching an old truck roll up under the awning, a gash on its side shedding red rust from dingy silver paint. A mom and dad and three kids spilling out.
“Are you the one that called 911?” the mom asked, voice shrill. “Did they hurt you too? Is that your blood? Those bastards.”
And then she hugged Rich, and he realized he was crying.
He hugged her back, the mother of the boy he assaulted, and bawled like a baby into her poorly permed hair.
That’s how he’d gotten home. They’d driven him.
Kindness from those he least deserved it from.
Richard shivered, suddenly hyper-aware of the smell of vomit, the cling of clammy, half-dried sweat, Pi still sitting quietly across from him.
He felt the minutes drag by.
“What am I keeping you from right now?” he finally asked. “If you’d stormed off when you had every right to, where would you be?”
Pi half-smiled at that. “Probably dancing. I really did want to dance.”
“I’ll leave my tab open for you. Go wild. And here,” Richard retrieved Pi’s earring from his pocket, holding it out.
Pi looked at it. “I don’t really want that back now.”
Richard’s hand fell. “Fair.”
Pi stood up, but he didn’t leave yet, shifting from foot to foot instead, tugging his crop top down so it covered the indents his jean shorts had left in his belly.
“The only one you hurt that night was that boy,” he finally said, voice velvet-edged. “I don’t know how many pity parties you’ve thrown since, but you didn’t deserve a single one. I hope you know that.”
Richard’s eyes—which had dried to a bloodshot, itchy red—started prickling again. “I do,” he rasped.
Pi still didn’t leave. Instead, he stepped forward and crouched. Took Richard’s hand and peeled his sweaty fingers apart, revealing the pink earring still resting in his palm.
Pi placed it back in Richard’s piercing, carefully, gently, no longer sweet.
He said quietly: “Don’t drag me into whatever story you tell yourself about tonight.”
Then he was gone.
Richard reached up, batted the earring, felt the weight of it sway.
Lyss Buchthal (they/them) is a U.S.-based writer whose work centers queer Americana, with themes primarily on identity, perception, and power. Their writing appears or is forthcoming in Neon Dystopia, The Orange & Bee, Pipeline Artists, and others.