Eric

I want to talk about this guy Tyler. I met him on craigslist looking for a bike. It was hot out. Sometime in May I think. I was a twenty-year-old college drop out and had recently totalled the Mercedes my grandfather gave to me on my sixteenth birthday. Depressed about my immobility, I wrongly assumed the bike would motivate me to do something—anything.

Tyler’s bike was nothing special. A flat bar Trek hybrid with a single drivetrain, eight gears, and a basket on the back. Most importantly, it was free. Is it still available? Are the components rusted? How new are the tires? I asked.

Tyler responded. Why u need a bike? Tell me bout urself. The email was signed Your Mom and I thought, and still think, his signature held a certain craigslist charm. For some reason, I told Tyler my aspirations without any hesitation. I’d exercise more. Grocery store more. Visit my two friends more. Diversify my palette. Vietnamese restaurant opening nearby! I even told Tyler about my dream of getting into film school. Then, I reiterated my questions.

Tyler did not respond for several days, so I expanded my search radius to include Davie County, which is just a few exits up 421, where the confederate flags start showing up. Another free bike in Davie that used the exact same photos as Tyler’s. The only difference was the racist bike was described as a Trek Road Bike, while Tyler’s was a SICK TREK ROAD BIKE. My relationship with Tyler nearly ended there and it probably should have.

But maybe Tyler had a similar enough bike and was just lazy about making a listing. It was free, after all. Who was I to judge? Was Tyler even real? I responded with a link to the other listing and asked Tyler what was up. That was all a front. Tyler emailed me back instantly. Need good piss to pass drug test. $50. – Your mom.

Okay. Where? I responded.

For the better part of two years, Tyler and I met every three months in the parking lot of the Chick-fil-A by the mall. I rode the racist clone of Tyler’s non-existent bike, and he drove a 1990 Honda Civic he claimed he got on craigslist for $500. He always wore high tube socks, sandals, shorts, and some variation of hoodie. Something was loose about him. Uninhibited. The way he twirled his Carolina Tarheels lanyard around his wrist, one way then the other. He was someone I admired at a time when I admired no one.

I think you should know that on top of the fifty bucks, Tyler always treated me to lunch. He never asked me what I wanted and just got me an eight nugget combo with sweet tea, which was my exact order. He got nuggets for himself too, and a kids meal of nuggets because he wanted the cone of IceDream® and lemonade that came with the kids meals. I always worried he’d confuse the lemonade with my urine and suggested that he bring a bottle rather than have my pee go in the exact same red calligraphy-chicken Styrofoam cup that held his lemonade.

“Honestly, I don’t give a fuck,” Tyler had responded to my suggestion, inspecting his hairline in the top of a saltshaker.

We had both gone to Mount Tabor High School and mostly discussed that over our nuggets. We knew all the same lore. The high school basketball coach who famously said, “It’s not gay if it’s for practice” to the six players he’d molested. The incident made national news and our little town was briefly famous. “How’s Pedoville?” my relatives in the Berkshires would ask.

My friends and I called the kid, Doug, the only one, as far as anyone knows, the coach went all the way with, “the boy who lived,” because, you know, Harry Potter. The coach didn’t even serve time. Doug switched up his testimony or something.

Oh, and if you’re wondering why Tyler needed my pee it’s because he’d been caught stealing a shopping cart full of beer from Walmart his senior year at Tabor. Him and two buddies went over to Walmart, Tyler filled a cart with cheap beer, while one guy watched the security guard who oscillated between the entrances, and the other distracted the greeter at the door with a question. Tyler was the “pusher” who got the satisfaction of rolling scot-free right out the door. They were kings, Tyler said, talking about himself and his buddies with a gilded smile.

“We gave out the beer at parties for free,” Tyler said. He paused afterwards, as if he was expecting my gratitude.

“That’s nice,” I said. 

I didn’t tell Tyler that my friends and I had done the same thing, following basically the same strategy. I didn’t want him to think I was trying to one up him. The time Tyler got caught, his friends ran for it and he was tackled by the security guard in front of the vending machines between the electronic doors. From his stomach, Tyler watched his friends burn rubber in the parking lot and a kid dressed as Spiderman, entering Walmart with his mom, laughed at him as he got his wrists zip tied.

“I would punt that kid,” Tyler said, gnashing a waffle fry. It was one of the overstuffed ones with no holes in it, that I discarded into piles for him. 

He would have been offered a much better plea deal, Tyler said, if he gave up his friends, but he didn’t. There was honor in that.

“Right?” He asked.

I agreed knowing had my friends and I been caught, I would have squealed before the rent-a-cop could even ask.

On our third meeting, I learned the real trouble for Tyler started a year ago when he broke parole to go to the 2017 NCAA Division I Men’s National Championship Game in Phoenix, to see his beloved Tarheels narrowly defeat the Kentucky Wildcats 75-73. His own mom turned him in, he told me, etching BITCH TITS into the Formica table between us with a quarter. He would always destroy something when he talked about the finer details of his life.

“Still love that bitch, though,” he said.

Tyler went to jail for thirty days, did something he called weekend jail which I still don’t fully understand, then was put on probation, which required clean urine.

And here’s how we did it: first I peed in the cup. Second, Tyler filled three balloons with my clean urine, and taped them to his inner thigh thirty minutes before his probation officer arrived. Thirty minutes was important because the cup needed to be warm. Third, he emptied the balloons into the collection cup, handed over the sample, and removed the tape.

“Too easy,” Tyler said with an Italian (?) accent. “I usually don’t get tested anyway,” he said, putting down the quarter, admiring his work. 

Along with the urine testing, Tyler had to do eight hours of community service every week on top of his full-time job at Honkey Tonk Pig, a BBQ staple in our town, where Tyler learned how to dice an onion in thirty seconds. A skill he reminded me of often.

When he finished talking Tyler said, “Worth it,” spun the quarter, and cracked his tattooed knuckles. I assumed he meant it was worth it to see Carolina win the Championship, but I didn’t ask. I nodded at a spot of Polynesian sauce instead. Giving Tyler my urine was some kind of atonement. I could have been right where he was, had I got caught, but, I of course know now, that isn’t true. 

Things basically went on like this, with increasing irregularity, for the next two years. I’d got into a film program—my last choice—at a local art school sandwiched between the crumbling shells of tobacco factories. Still, it was the first time life had given me a thumbs up, and I was riding a wave of self-importance. My parents were so pleased I was back in school, they bought me a car; I sold the racist bike to some sucker on Craigslist for $125.

“This is our artsy one,” my parents now introduced me to their fancy friends when I came over to swim in our pool.

I even changed my Dad’s name in my phone back from Scam Likely to Dad.

Chickfila? Chickfila? Chickfila? Chickfila? Chickfila? Tyler would text me until I responded. It wasn’t that I was too busy. I just didn’t want to do it anymore. I was tired of abstaining from weed, and I didn’t really need Tyler’s fifty bucks anymore. It wasn’t worth how depressing and uncomfortable having lunch with him had become. More on that in a bit. After like 25 Chikfila? texts Tyler would just say ANSWER ME. Then, just ANSWER. Around then, I finally would. I’d make up an excuse about class and he would say something like it’s chill but I need pee now. Truthfully, I was always a little afraid of Tyler.

We were both tall skinny white guys to begin with, but Tyler had an additional fifty or so pounds on me now. It seemed every year I aged, Tyler aged five. His hairline was so far back now his head looked like a skin-colored light bulb. I imagined slowly unscrewing it as he dipped his nuggets. He’d also cut off the tip of his index finger dicing an onion in thirty seconds.

“At least I don’t have to finger my girlfriend anymore,” he said, having a sip of either my urine or his kid’s meal lemonade.

I was pretty sure Tyler didn’t actually have a girlfriend. He used to. She joined us for nuggets one time. Audrey. When I mentioned her now, he steamrolled over her name.

“How’s Audr–”

“WHOREEEEEEE.”

Tyler had changed his ringtone to the Carolina Fight Song and when his phone rang he would bang his fist on the table and yell “Rah Rah Rah Car’lina,” along with it until it was finally over. Children would cry, and he’d not give a fuck. I could never understand why a school he never went to meant so much to him.

“You’re a big anal guy, aren’t you?” he asked me one of the last times, pointing a nugget right at me, another rolling between his syllables.

“Never done it,” I lied. He nodded and chewed, nodded and chewed. I didn’t care about seeming or being cool around him anymore. Tyler, I realized, was not cool. He was not like my film school friends, none of whom were from North Carolina or even the south. They all had plans to leave and make a career for themselves in LA or New York. I hoped to follow them there and do the same. North Carolina, they said, over their Cortados and American Spirits, was a stopover. That was cool.

Still, I felt sorry for Tyler. What his life had become in front of my eyes. Did anyone care for him? Sometimes he was clearly on something bad. He’d forget what I was talking about, his face expressionless as raw meat. There was a birthday party in the back of Chick-fil-A one time, and I’ll never forget when Tyler followed the cow mascot around, pulling his tail, weaving in and out of children in tiaras and barbeque sauced faces, to force the cow to Moo.

“Do it again. Do it again. Do it again.”

It’s good to know what failure looks like, I thought watching him, through my fingers, to know who you’re afraid of becoming. The only thing I liked about hanging out with Tyler then, I realized, was feeling superior to him.

Tyler’s house was on the other side of town, and when he didn’t have to go to work afterwards, I would drive him home so he didn’t have to take the bus. He’d gotten a DUI in our last year of knowing each other, so it was the least I could do.

I had only gone to East Winston growing up to pick up fried chicken with my dad, so Tyler had to give me directions every time. On our last ride together, Tyler invited me into his apartment to smoke me out, which I didn’t question at the time, but it makes no sense given our arrangement. Upon reflection, it’s possible that Tyler may have never really needed my urine at all.

The frame of Tyler’s door had been wood-glued back together because he kicked the door in the night Carolina lost to Villanova in 2016 on a buzzer beater, he explained, jiggling the lock. 

“I would cripple that fuck,” Tyler said finally muscling through the door. 

A white pitbull writhed and cried on the other side. Tyler knelt and let it coat his face in saliva.

“Sorry, which fuck?”

“This is Nala,” he said, ignoring me. “Like the hot lion.”

Nala’s food was sprinkled throughout the apartment. The living room was a battlefield of her wounded toys. Tyler’s massive sectional that outsized his living room had gotten the Nala treatment too, and was bursting at the seams.

“I got this from a strip club,” Tyler said.

I followed him into the kitchen. The linoleum floors peeled up at the corners, and the white walls were tapioca with cigarette smoke. A cardboard disc was on top of the stove with the translucent cheese of a frozen pizza sprinkled around it. Tyler handed me a Milwaukee’s Best Ice, pushed the disc onto the floor, and flipped on an electric burner. He fished a pre-made turkey burger patty out of its plastic in the fridge.

“Do you want one?” he said, like he was daring me to say yes.

“No thanks,” I said, noticing the hundreds of empty liquor bottles displayed on top of the cabinets, filled with guts of Wexford highlighters, so that under a black light they glowed in the dark.

“That’s not even half my collection,” Tyler boasted, noticing my eye-line, putting the turkey burger into a dirty non-stick on the lowest setting. I watched the humiliated turkey burger oxidize; it looked like a massive wad of chewing gum.

“It’ll be done in like an hour,” Tyler said, gesturing for me to follow him.

The “magnum bottles,” he called them, Tyler kept in the footlocker in front of his bed. Surprisingly made up—better than mine. He positioned the first one he showed me, a giant bottle of Grey Goose, between his legs and quickly masturbated it to completion, his hand bursting with  a fireworks display of cum. “This one is from Nala’s last birthday, that’s why it’s on top.”

He continued on like this for a while, handing me bottles of Hennesey, Crown Royal, and Three Olives, claiming to have a part in drinking all of them. I didn’t understand Tyler’s life and was ready to get high and leave. 

“This one is from when Carolina retired Hansborough’s jersey, which is right up there.”

He pointed to one of three Carolina Jerseys hanging from his wall. UNC stuff, by the way, was everywhere.

I picked up one of his basketball trophies from Tabor and read the date. It was made out to someone else.          

“Tyler’s my middle name,” he said, noticing my confusion.

“You played?”

“Yeah.”

On his hands and knees, he put up his liquor bottles, like a child putting away his toys.

“Did you apply to UNC?” I said to his bald spot.

Tyler turned and held up three fingers. “Three times,” he said.

Finally, we smoked on his back porch, sitting next to each other on white plastic lounge chairs that Tyler had stolen from a neighborhood pool, watching an early afternoon storm toss the green canopies of maple and oak, like lazy pom poms. We sat in silence passing a blunt Tyler expertly rolled in a gutted White Owl. His tiny slice of yard was as bleak as indoors. The charred remains of a couch sat upright in the thick grass by an emptied pony keg. Tyler said he was trying to get rid of it since he got the stripper couch and figured he could burn it, but Nala didn’t like that, and his “Mexican friend” with a truck still hadn’t come to get the charred remains.

Tyler crushed up a Klonopin under a dollar with the heel of his cell phone, rolled the bill and snorted it. He offered me the bill, and I said no thanks, I’ve got to go soon. Tyler seemed hurt by that, and I softened to him, leaned back into the chair, to show him, soon didn’t mean now.  He took off his shirt and looked like dirty laundry piled into the lawn chair, his gut cascading in tiers into his Carolina Blue lap. The same shorts he wore when we first met. He had tattoos all over his torso and upper thighs—mostly stick-and-pokes he’d acquired in weekend jail. There were several failed attempts at Ramsey the Ram that always got some feature wrong—usually the horns. Random doodles and words were scrawled on his belly and thighs. Tar Heels. BOSS HOG. FUCK TEX. Tiny empty beer cans spilled down his legs. A healed puncture wound where Nala had bitten his arm.

Despite everything, and maybe just because I was very high, I stayed.

When the Klonopin hit, Tyler’s eyes receded even deeper inside of him. I thought he looked like a blockhead from Super Mario and giggled out loud. Tyler giggled too as if he was in on the joke and for the first time looked truly happy.

There we were watching the trees sway overhead like green liquid. I had the sensation of being in them, rocking back and forth, back and forth until I fell asleep.

Tyler was beside me unzipping my jeans when I woke up.

“What are you doing?” I said, but Tyler kept going like I’d said nothing. He did not look at me, so I focused back on the trees, the voices of children playing nearby. I gripped the arms of the stolen lounge chair while Tyler’s bald head bobbed up and down between my legs. I felt like I was living out some half-baked fantasy. Nope. Tyler was giving me head. He was surprisingly tender too, stopping to kiss my thighs, roll his lips just over the head, take all of me in slow wet gulps. I was unashamed because he was unashamed. My first glimpse of what it would be like to enjoy being gay.

I finished quickly into Tyler’s mouth. He stood up slowly, spit me into the yard, lit a cigarette, walked down into the grass, sat on top of the pony keg, and smoked. I waited for him to say something, but he didn’t. Tyler was Tyler again. I stood up to leave, noisily shifting the stolen chair but Tyler did not turn around. He continued to smoke hunched in front of the pillars of kudzu that separated his apartment from another row.

Inside, the turkey burger had reduced to a puddle of soot and filled the house with smoke. I turned off the burner, grabbed the frozen pizza box on the kitchen floor, and fanned my way into the living room. Nala was in the living room tunneling into the strip club sectional. She growled, warning me. Her eyes yellow diamonds through the smoke.

“It’s okay. You’re okay. You’re okay, ” I cooed, stepping over chunks of upholstery on my way to the door. Fuck. Did his own dog even love him back?

When I got home, it finally started to rain, and I sat in my driveway for a long time. I wondered if somehow Tyler had known all along I was gay. If he’d told someone or would. That night, I texted him to ask if we could talk. It’s not gay if it’s for practice, he responded in the middle of the night. A part of me had known since I held his basketball trophy: Tyler was the boy who lived.

Three years had passed by the time I heard from Tyler again; I was living in Brooklyn

doing well enough in film for townies to approach me on the holidays with questions about celebrities I’d never met, but not well enough to uber to the airport, or to truly enjoy living in New York, or feel worthy of any man.

It was three in the morning when Tyler called. I woke up assuming he was the twink from Grindr I’d been desperate to come over before bed, but the texts that followed gave him away. ANSWER ME. Then, just ANSWER. I climbed the ladder of our exchanges framed by the light of my phone. Years of Chickfila? Sure. When? K. Cool. Then, his final river of unanswered texts that followed that day at his apartment: Chickfila?Chickfila?Chickfila?Chickfila?Chickfila?Chickfila?Chickfila?Chickfila?Chickfila?Chickfila?Chickfila?Chickfila?Chickfila?Chickfila?Chickfila?Chickfila?Chickfila?Chickfila?Chickfila?Chickfila?Chickfila?Chickfila?Chickfila?Chickfila?Chickfila?Chickfila?Chickfila?Chickfila?Chickfila?Chickfila?Chickfila?Chickfila?Chickfila?Chickfila?Chickfila?Chickfila?Chickfila?Chickfila?Chickfila?Chickfila?Chickfila?Chickfila? I flicked through hundreds.

I did not call Tyler back. Nor have I. He left a voicemail that took me months to work up the courage to listen to.

I’m a Tar Heel born,
I’m a Tar Heel bred,
And when I die
I’m a Tar Heel dead.
So it’s RAH, RAH, Car’lina ‘lina
RAH, RAH, Car’lina ‘lina
RAH, RAH, Car’lina
RAH! RAH! RAH RAH RAH RAH

Car’lina
Car’lina
Car’lina,

he shouted.