Prologue
The local news had something to say about it. So did the national outlets. And the global media corporations. Even your grandma had her opinions though she doesn’t like to think about such nasty kinds of things.
There was talk of it at water coolers, over hedges, in lines.
Memes. Texts. Links. Talk show monologues.
Most focused on the tight body and dashing face of the young man who did what he did.
But there was more to it, as there always was, and when that “more” came to light, it took everyone by surprise.
The news outlets displayed countless pictures of the young man hiking without a shirt or smiling on the beach but they only had one photo of the older man, wearing a gray fleece, donning a soft smile.
And that’s when people had trouble mixing these two people together, not like water and oil, but orange juice and lighter fluid—they could pair, but should they?
Standard for these cases, there was an inability to ever see how it all once worked for these two men, how everything was going right before it went wrong?
Despite the culminating show of anger, hurt, and rejection, there was the forgotten fuel of passion.
There was a time of rubbing inner thighs, spit hungrily swallowed, and their relief at finding someone who was able to catch their particular drift.
It was the newness of watching a bare butt jiggle over to the bathroom. It was the chasing thrill of watching a lit fuse. To both of them, it was not only new but a rarity.
No matter what you’ve been told with whatever spin, know that it was love.
It just couldn’t stay that way.
Chapter I
Everything echoed in the cement block of the bathroom. The crash of the outside surf slipped in through the open rectangle, a doorway with no door--inviting, generous. The swirl of the flushing toilets mimicked the crash of the ocean, pockets and sprays of sand created lurid visuals across the graffiti-scratched hard plastic of the horseshoe seats. And, of course, the sound of falling water: the showers, positioned directly in front of 3 bathroom stalls, practically an open hand to gawk–voyeurs made of anyone who dared sit down and peek through the stall cracks to behold hard bodies bathing in front of a chrome background, shine before shine–a silhouette for consumption.
Ted Chambers discovered this place of wet worship during an extended lunch break, 2 hours after he was due back at his computer. He had to walk through his new program design with some idiot in a suit who would bring it to a later meeting of his own, taking credit for any of Ted’s nuance and essential input despite reassurances of “One second” and “Oh no wait” as the executive stumbled through his shaky, poorly-regurgitated tutorial, forgetting Ted’s specificity of use, too busy congratulating himself during his earlier swaggered jaunt to the conference room.
The medical insurance world was no pleasant thing to navigate, even though Ted only worked with it indirectly, building apps that weaponized the data of the sick, helpless, and, often, poor.
The creating, the structuring, the wording, all guided by whomever the medical insurance company wanted to gatekeep and what they wanted to withhold and in what ways.
Never great at coping with the moral dilemmas of his work, Ted had started drinking in front of his computer, during the day. It started out as a quick dash of a pour into the morning coffee, until it became full glasses of wine perched precariously next to his keyboard with Ted wishing, in an 11 am red-blend haze, that the glass would somehow tip itself over, slosh itself across the keys, soak the board, and wipe out the program along with Ted’s relationship with those shark-toothed men and the stacked daily hours they spent ruining people’s lives up in their streak-free, wide-windowed offices so high that eager birds regularly crashed into them, believing themselves to be soaring through hazard-free open air.
But how could Ted wag a finger when he, too, had an office like that himself, a whole section of a floor with a personal secretary—dedicated to what he built: Chambers Solutions. A colleague told Ted the name sounded like a porta-potty business yet the insurance companies had no problem deciphering the dealings of Chambers Solutions with Ted and his master’s degree in software engineering, hence the private floor, secretary, and the quite-achievable goal of retiring at 60.
Ted was just four years away as he sat in that oceanside bathroom with the lurid view.
It was a dirty thing to do, a pervy thing to do, but Ted had always come to the beach with good intentions. Too embarrassed to drink in the office, he’d work from home most days only to get drunk before noon and then what was he supposed to do, continue to work and not ride-share a few miles over to the beach to distract himself from just what it was he built and regularly allowed to happen?
It was muddling through the earlier part of his day, trudging through the day-drinking haze, that he could feel the sleaze of his daily production and, much worse, his own growing greed at the constant contracts that left him with more money than he knew what to do with. And donating did little to help ease the shame. Homeless youth, limbless dogs, sick trees choked with wicked beetles? Ted threw money at it all yet he still had trouble slipping off the covers in the morning, unless he was reaching down for his miny fridge that couldn’t house more than two bottles of wine but had no problem being a home to dozens of those two-shot liquor bottles that went down faster than Ted’s morning brain could formulate a clear thought of self-hatred.
So, rather than call a therapist or take up running to alleviate his darker thoughts, Ted started going to the beach during his lunch breaks, or, really, his breaks from drinking at work, having his assistant Lorraine, who came into the empty office every day, push his lesser meetings and phone calls to the days where Ted promised he wouldn’t get as hammered.
Ted got the idea of a daily sandy escape from having Baywatch play muted on in the background. It was calming to watch beautiful people save other beautiful people while he wrote code doing the opposite of the on-screen hulking heroism—building programs that essentially killed people, saving only the rich and prosperous and rarely were they hot.
But making it to the beach, after a hiccupping Ted and his collapsible chair sat in the backseat of a rideshare, was nothing like bright 90s television. The cut and sculpted gods trudging through the sand, their tan toes gripping then releasing the grit, were real. Real life was less soapy and more raw. The sounds were constant. On top of the bleating gulls and the rolling tide, there was a deep laughter, blending and rising like the nearby crystal waters.
Laser Beach was next to the community college so there was no shortage of delicious, legal beefcake wearing little—short shorts were “in” again below heads of full, flowing hair. Despite being as gay as they come, but completely closeted, Ted even found his gaze lingering on the co-ed’s swollen bikinis that hung like ripe fruit.
Sure, he had tried discreet dating, raised in a flagrantly heterosexist, “Greed is good” era where you’d rather be dead than have your homosexuality discovered, and even he had a few successful but empty hookups with escorts, but Ted took his work home with him, which meant nights were heavy on the anguish and the building hangover with little energy to play the field on the sly. Plus, Ted struggled with his looks.
At 56 years old, Ted’s hair had started to thin, becoming a limp black and white crew cut, and his paunch had become a beer belly thanks to the constant drinking. People on the hookup apps assured Ted he was a “hot daddy” after appraising his headless torso pics and the escorts had no problem reaching sticky, seminal conclusions with him, but they were at work and Ted never followed through with any of the available people online. And he was fine with that, something like a small nod of settling, cause that meant no one, without receiving an envelope of cash, ever saw his big, wide nose or the deep grooves in his skin. Looking deep in the mirror with a mouth downturned—his favorite way to self-harm with a gut full of wine—Ted didn’t like the way he looked.
So he went to the beach for daily distraction, in an attempt to forget himself, choosing to focus on the young men. Their swift movements on shore, taut sand-kissed calves and the sun glinting off sweat wriggling down the undulating muscles of their arms; and their hard bodies in repose, brawny fingers gripping their boards as they lolled in the ocean—rising, settling, rising, settling—waiting for the next wave.
Always still buzzed during his beach time, there was added intoxication of being in the onshore throng, anchored in his canvas chair among a swarm of young people existing (playing, giggling, blaring music, cooking their taut skin under the eye of an orange sun).
But, Ted’s tenth time there, after an hour or so, he sobered up earlier than usual and realized that he stuck out like an old, sore thumb: he was surrounded by youth, a club he was no longer part of with the password changed and the “language” of the striplings hitting his ear like gibberish from a distant planet he couldn’t quite remember ever visiting—had Ted ever convincingly called someone “dude”?
All too aware, Ted felt his sweat pooling into his robin’s egg polo with his back aching from the lack of lumbar support, but he didn’t need a better chair, he needed to leave. The sun, making its way toward descent, revealed all and, to Ted, its revelation decreed, “Grandpa got his time but now might be the moment to go.”
With a grunt, Ted heaved himself from the chair, trying to scurry away with a little dignity, then focused on his walk back to the parking lot, trying to steady the laborious waddle he had developed from refusing to stretch or regularly engage his core. Safe to say, his muscles were tight and his back was nothing but pissed.
Only his attempt at “sturdy” was no use and, sort of shuffle-gliding across the sand, Ted nearly tripped over a thicket of dried seaweed.
I gotta get outta here, he thought, rolling his tongue around his dehydrated mouth in search of moisture.
Before he would request his rideshare, now free of the sandy terrain, Ted first entered the bathroom shanty. Through its entryway and around a corner of royal blue cement were, on one side, chrome showers, without privacy stalls, and sinks in the corner. The bathroom stalls were situated on the other side.
Ted slapped the big circular metallic button under the first shower, angling his water shoes under the blasting spray.
The sand slipping from his bottom half cowered then crowded together before falling into the waffled drain. Even over the thrum of the shower, he could hear his breathing in his ears which made him feel old, like maybe imbibing then sitting inert and exposed in the sun for hours wasn’t the best daily combination.
But it’s too late for me, Ted thought, Why change what I’m doing? I mean, at least I’m getting outside.
Another part of him chimed in: “Cause you’re trying to escape.”
As if the water had begun to scald him, Ted yanked his foot from the shower’s spray and, surprised, after regaining composure, he stamped his feet. Ted peered over his shoulder toward the entryway then ducked down, trying to spot the pair of legs over at the bathroom stalls belonging to whoever had spoken to him in such stern, stripping words.
Ted’s warm taupe eyes shifted to the left, his eyelids narrowing.
Where had the voice sprung from?
Then, with a break in the waves and the shower silenced to a trickle, came the scrape and slap of shoes.
Someone was coming.
The older man could’ve left, plucked up his collapsible chair from against the wall, and fled, past whoever was about to enter the restroom—never to return to Laser Beach—and then he’d go back to his condo, paid-off, and blow through the days, the pre-twilight years of his life, with some work and more wine, asking Lorraine to push his 11:30 meetings to 2:30 because he had stumbled to the couch in a drunken stupor and a nap was not only needed but necessary. Maybe he’d even get on a call, still drunk, and ruin his reputation, far past the known one for being a bit tardy, a tad hard to get in touch with, and lose everything by calling out the nasty people he worked for, the sweet, pickled grapes doing all his talking, stirring up such nerve.
Or maybe, as the stranger strutted in and Ted passed them, cast in the amber kiss of golden hour, he’d have gone home and poured the many bottles he had down the drain and worked off his current contracts until Ted could shirk them for more respectable ones, living quietly and certainly, a job well done with a later legacy of earnestness and solitude.
But there’s always more than two roads.
And, in Ted’s actual choosing to scurry away from the approaching footsteps and into the bathroom stall, he, in fact, chose the wild wood where he would tread a new path, one that bled and healed, produced smiles, wide and proud; a road that would also end in a heavy-hanging head.
And at Ted’s first snapping step, he could’ve feared a fully treacherous journey until a fruiting tree, just up ahead, presented itself and who, even the sensible, even the meek, would withhold themselves the pleasure of a taste?
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