Michael and Ricky have been inseparable since fourth grade. While other kids played football, they discussed death. Mostly they exchanged information: that grandparents are usually the ones who die, but parents and even other kids can too; that animals eat your body when you’re dead; that you turn blue; that you go to heaven, maybe, depending on your religion.
In fifth grade, their classmate Chris Potter found his stepdad hanging by a rubber belt in his garage, and Potter’s association with the great unknown conferred on him a certain sagacity. Out of what seemed like pity to everyone but themselves, Michael and Ricky let Potter into their clique so they could ask questions like, “Did you cry?” and, “Was he naked?” and, “Does the garage door still work?”
They continued to discuss death until middle school, when they became more interested in sex. Michael made lists of the girls he planned to ask to dance at his bar mitzvah and Ricky made lists of famous people he was planning to sleep with once he’d made it on Wall Street. He’d seen enough movies to know that everyone in New York was a little bit bisexual if you had enough money, and he’d later turn out to be right.
Ricky had come out a year earlier, in sixth grade, to the surprise of no one, and to the derision of everyone in school except Michael. It was 1994, shortly after Magic Johnson announced his HIV diagnosis. Ricky wasn’t worried about the disease; Pittsfield, he assumed, was too far west on the Mass Pike for the urban sprawl of the virus, and besides, he was ten. What excited him were the condom demonstrations squeezed into every TV special on the subject. Watching Magic roll a rubber down the shaft of a banana was Ricky’s first experience in pornography. And though the high-speed modem would rear its head in his household by year’s end, Magic’s hands on the potassium-rich phallus would stick with him, a weather vane pointing turgidly toward the future.
In fact, it was this very condom demo, shown again during sixth grade health class, that gave Ricky the courage to declare his orientation during morning announcements. Never one to shy away from showmanship, Ricky marched to the stage in a Magic Johnson jersey he’d found at the nearby Champion outlet. He was booed; the kids at school were Celtics fans.
Bless Michael, who managed to exist outside the pressures of high school Darwinism by frolicking mostly in his own dreamy mind. It’s not that Michael didn’t care what other people thought, but that he never quite noticed.
It’s supposed to be better for gay teens these days, what with tolerance taught in schools, and gay characters on television, and a generational turn away from open homophobia and toward a more hidden one, but gay teens still pop up in the obits, their terrified eyes triggering Ricky’s memories of the fear he felt, each day, walking home while farm dudes drove past in their pickup trucks holding sawed-off shotguns out the windows as they called his name and hysterically laughed.
By junior year, Ricky and Michael were still virgins. Ricky didn’t know any other gay people. There was a club at school called the Gay-Straight Alliance, an aspirational title. The club’s only members were goth straight girls and two stoners who knew that membership in the club meant membership in the goth girls’ password-protected panties.
Besides, the GSA kids were cloyingly political, driving to Boston for Pride marches, and circulating petitions for unisex bathrooms. Ricky’s interests were strictly libidinal. One night, after many shots from a bottle of melon liqueur that had been gathering dust at the back of Ricky’s parents’ liquor cabinet, he managed to convince Michael that a mouth is a mouth. Michael seemed to enjoy it, but he hurt Ricky’s feelings by telling him, after, that he’d pretended the fellating tongue belonged to their math teacher, Ms. Picciola. Michael and Ricky were awkward around each other through the following week, but things quickly went back to normal. Nothing like it ever happened again.
Ricky’s still soft. The shower still runs. “I’m in control,” he whispers again and taps the SD bracelet against his teeth. Ricky doesn’t play Shamerican Sykosis, but over the past year, he’s been buying Sykodollars. At first, he acquired SD to trade for drugs online, sick of the laxative-cut coke that fueled the club scene. But as the Dow plunged, and Wall Street crashed, and a possible bailout was vetoed by Congress, Ricky realized he had a hedge against the volatile dollar. Shamerica, with its rising popularity and flourishing markets, was a safe storage vault. The dollar dropped and the SD slowly, unnoticeably rose.
The hedge had paid off, but the really interesting thing happened after that. The game’s creator, a guy called Lucas Van Lewig, reached out to Ricky, offering a wildly lucrative opportunity for investment. And maybe the thought of these prospective riches has hit a primal nerve, or the Viagra has kicked in, because Ricky has finally come to glorious tumescence when Broder emerges, removes the towel draped over his arm to reveal a handgun, and fires.
2.
Detective Ryan has been taking statements for nearly eight hours, trying to gauge what went down. One thing is clear: Jay Devor’s speech at the Funeral for Capitalism was a call to arms, and when it was over, Devor led a parade of weapon-wielding #Occupiers to a finance party at the Zone Hotel. What’s not clear is where Devor ended up. He wasn’t at the hotel, and security footage hasn’t turned up his face. How much planning was involved and where the weapons came from are more difficult questions, and ones that can’t be answered by the stoned-looking kid who sits across
