ice-cube count, and, after suggesting that she could just go fuck herself, our host reached into the waistband of his track pants and pulled out a bag of marijuana. It was eight ounces at least, a small cushion, and as I feasted my eyes upon it Little Mike pushed his wife’s feet off the coffee table, saying, “Bitch, go get me my scale.”
“I’m watching TV. Get it your own self.”
“Whore,” he said.
“Asshole.”
“See the kind of shit I have to live with?” Little Mike sighed and retreated to the rear of the trailer — the bedroom, I guessed — returning a minute later with a scale and some rolling papers. The pot was sticky with lots of buds, and its smell reminded me of a Christmas tree, though not the one perched atop the barstool. After weighing my ounce and counting out my money, Little Mike rolled a joint, which he lit, drew upon, and handed to my brother. It then went to me, and just as I was passing it back to our host, his wife piped up: “Hey, what about me?”
“Now look who wants to play,” her husband said. “Women. They’ll suck the fucking paper off a joint, but when old Papa Bear needs a little b.j. action they’ve always got a sore throat.”
Beth tried to speak and hold in the smoke at the same time: “Hut hup, hasshole.”
“Either of you guys married?” Little Mike asked, and Paul shook his head no. “I got pre-engaged one time, but David here hasn’t never come close, his being a faggot and all.”
Little Mike laughed, and then he looked at me. “For real?” he said. “Is Bromine telling me the truth?”
“Oh, he’s all up inside that shit,” Paul said. “Has hisself a cocksucker — I mean a boyfriend — and everything.”
I could have done my own talking, but it was sort of nice listening to my brother, who sounded almost boastful, as if I were a pet that had learned to do math.
“Well, what do you know,” Little Mike said.
His wife stirred to action then and became almost sociable. “So this boyfriend,” she said. “Let me ask. Which one of you is the woman?”
“Well, neither of us,” I told her. “That’s what makes us a homosexual couple. We’re both guys.”
“But no,” she said. “I mean, like, in prison or whatnot. One of you has to be in for murder and the other for child molesting or something like that, right? I mean, one is more like a normal man.”
I wanted to ask if that would be the murderer or the child molester, but instead I just accepted the joint, saying, “Oh, we live in New York,” as if that answered the question.
We stayed in the trailer for another half hour, and during the ride back to Raleigh I thought about what the drug dealer’s wife had said. Her examples were a little skewed, but I knew what she was getting at. People I know, people who live in houses and do not call their remote control “the nigger,” have often asked the same question, though usually in regard to lesbians, who are always either absent or safely out of earshot. “Which one’s the man?”
It’s astonishing the amount of time that certain straight people devote to gay sex — trying to determine what goes where and how often. They can’t imagine any system outside their own, and seem obsessed with the idea of roles, both in bed and out of it. Who calls whom a bitch? Who cries harder when the cat dies? Which one spends the most time in the bathroom? I guess they think that it’s that cut-and-dried, though of course it’s not. Hugh might do the cooking, and actually wear an apron while he’s at it, but he also chops the firewood, repairs the hot-water heater, and could tear off my arm with no more effort than it takes to uproot a dandelion. Does that make him the murderer, or do the homemade curtains reduce him to the level of the child molester?
I considered these things as I looked at the wildflowers he’d collected the day before the water was shut off. Some were the color I associate with yield signs, and others a sort of muted lavender, their stems as thin as wire. I pictured Hugh stooping, or maybe even kneeling, as he went about picking them, and then I grabbed the entire bunch and tossed it out the window. That done, I carried the vase into the kitchen