Choice of Evil

“That too.”

“Even after what I told you?”

“What? That fairy story about how you love this guy? You’re a power freak, so what? I already figured that one out.”

“Kiss my ass.”

“The only thing I want to do with your ass is watch it walk away,” I told her.

She stepped close to me, stood on her toes, her chest brushing mine. “You’re a liar,” she said softly.

“Behavior is the truth,” I answered, blocking her game-player’s jab. Then I turned away and snapped my fingers for Pansy to come.

She was quiet on the drive back. At least for a few minutes. When I lit another smoke, she pointedly hit the switch for her window. I did the same for mine.

“I’m cold,” she said, something different in her voice. . . too ghosty for me to grab.

“You want the heater on? It’s got to be seventy degrees out.”

“No. I’m just not. . . dressed right,” she said, hugging herself. She wasn’t wrong about that—the lemon silk T-shirt she was wearing showed her off real good, but it was about the same as going topless when it came to weather protection. And you didn’t need X-ray eyes to see she wasn’t wearing anything under it.

“I’ve got a blanket in the trunk,” I told her.

“Why can’t I just wear your jacket?”

“Because it’s full of stuff that’s none of your business.”

“Like. . . what? A gun?”

“There’s that thing about language again,” I told her. “What does ‘none of your business’ mean to you?”

“Fine,” she sniffed.

I snapped my cigarette out the window. “Thank you,” she said, sending her own closed. I did the same.

“Better now?” I asked her.

“Yes.”

She went quiet again. I shoved in a cassette, turned one of the dials to crank the bass heavier toward the rear of the car—Pansy likes the bass lines best.

“Who’s that?” she asked after a couple of minutes.

“Judy Henske.”

“Oh, wow. She’s. . . great. I never even heard of her. Is she, like, old or something?”

“How old does she sound?”

“Like she’s about thirty-five. . . and like she’s lived a couple of centuries.”

“Good call,” I told her, letting Judy’s fire-and-velvet voice roll over us both. That particular tape was all estrogen—KoKo Taylor, Katie Webster, Etta James, Marcia Ball, Irma Thomas, Little Esther, Janis, La Vern Baker, Big Mama.

“I never heard any of that,” she said toward the end. “Ever.”

“Then you’ve been cheated, girl.”

“Are any of them. . . alive. I mean. . .”

“Marcia Ball was in town last week. Judy’s on the coast. KoKo’s still working. Sure.”

“Would you take me? I mean, take me to hear some of that. . . what is it, anyway?”

“It’s what you call it. To me, it’s the blues.”

“But it doesn’t make you blue. I mean, the songs are. . . sad. Some of them. But that one, the engineer one, that was. . .”

“Raucous?” I asked her. Magic Judy’s “Oh, You Engineer” puts it right in your face—you want her to ride your train, you better have one hell of a motor.

“Yeah. She sounds so tough.”

“She’s a mean woman, no question.”

“Not like. . . nasty, right?”

“No. One who can take care of herself.”

“And you like that? In a woman?”

“That’s all I do like,” I said, telling her the truth for once.

“What you said to me before. . . when I told you to kiss my ass.”

“Yeah?”

“I shouldn’t have said that.”

I didn’t say anything, thinking of where my line had come from: a stripper I knew a long time ago, standing in front of a mirror, looking back over her shoulder to make sure the black seams on her nylons were straight. . . “My butt is my best feature. The only time a man ever really fell in love with me was when I was walking away from him.”

Silence filled the car. I didn’t switch tapes—we were only a few blocks from the joint where I was going to drop her off.

“You don’t know what to do with an apology, do you?” she finally asked.

“Sure.”

“No, you don’t. I apologized for what I said. Now it’s your turn.”

“I got nothing to apologize for,” I told her, pulling to the curb.

She opened the door, turned to face me, said, “You know you lied,” and slammed the door behind her.

Things were quiet for a few days. I invested a lot of time trying to put a sweet little sting together, but it wouldn’t mesh. So I passed. That’s the way I do business—safely or not at all. Impatience imprisons.

The city stayed edgy. Then the director of one of the above-ground pedophile organizations turned the key to start his pretty new car and drove straight to hell. The radio report said the car exploded right in the freak’s driveway.

First Amendment absolutists wrote frenzied letters to newspaper editors, bemoaning a country where a person could be executed for expressing unpopular opinions. They didn’t sign their names. Talk shows were loaded with pious pigs droning about the wages of sin. The cops said they had some suspects, but no prime ones.

For all that, the smart money was that the hit was personal, not political. The major pedophile organizations love to publish their little “Enemies Lists,” especially on the Net. But if they knew how long that list really was, they’d spend the money on bulletproof vests instead.

Still, the group the dead man had headed decided they needed it to be political, milk it for the mileage. So they announced a candlelight vigil would be held outside Gracie Mansion—the Mayor’s house.

They were standing there, mourning their loss for the TV cameras, when somebody who knew how to use a grenade launcher took seven of them out with one blast.

The snuff film was a big hit on the networks. But nobody put it together—in fact, most of them were a hundred and eighty degrees off—until the next letter arrived.

There are many ways to oppress gays. Fag-bashing is the most obvious, but not the most devastating. Physical attacks on homosexuals are not only tolerated by the general community, but covertly encouraged. These are known facts. What is not known is that much of the animosity against gays is fueled by the utterly false belief that a pedophile is a homosexual run amok. Journalism has been complicitous in this fraud. The very newspaper in which this is being printed is a prime example. Remember the headline: “Teacher Arrested in Homosexual Child Abuse”? That story involved a kindergarten teacher and a five-year-old boy. Ask yourselves—and this is addressed to the journalism community as well—if the victim had been a little girl, would the headlines have screamed “Heterosexual Child Abuse!”? You know the answer. Much of this is ignorance, but some of it is by design. Pedophiles have carefully self-styled as “gay,” seeking to extend the continuum of tolerance for homosexual relations between consenting adults to the rape of children. How many pedophiles have camouflaged themselves as “gay activists” in order to use the old “First they came for the Jews” canard to terrify gays into some “common cause” nonsense? Gays hate child molesters as much as straights do. Some of us, more so. Some of us victims much more so. After careful consideration, I have concluded that pedophiles who insist on being labeled “homosexual” are equally guilty of fag-bashing. Now they will