I.
Dave is many things. He is a bastard. He is my oldest friend. He is the only man alive who can call me on my bullshit without getting punched, partly because he’s bigger than me, partly because he’s usually right, and mostly because taking a hand off the wheel to punch him at ninety miles an hour on the I-15 through the Mojave Desert at one in the morning is the sort of decision that solves one problem by creating several worse ones.
We were coming back from Vegas. The Fourth of July, UFC 175, a long weekend that had involved more testosterone, more bourbon, and more questionable decisions than any two men in their fifties should be permitted to accumulate in a seventy-two-hour window. Dave had lost five hundred dollars on the Weidman-Machida fight: a bet he’d proposed, insisted on, and then spent three rounds regretting with a vocabulary that expanded with each round until he’d exhausted the conventional profanity and begun inventing new combinations that would have impressed a longshoreman. I’d won the five hundred. This fact sat between us in the car like a third passenger, smug and heavy, adjusting its seatbelt.
“So,” he said. Mile marker 246, Baker, California, the thermometer sign reading 97 degrees at one in the morning. “The blog.”
II.
We met as running partners in the years when we were both married to women and both employed in professions that rewarded a particular kind of man, and we have crossed more finish lines together than I can count, most of them literal. One of them was his, three years ago, at fifty-four: a newly minted gay man, his phrase, as though queerness were a coin struck at a government facility and handed out on a bureaucrat’s schedule. He is still getting used to the physics of it. He is still getting used to his nipples, which he swears are straight.
“You’re telling his story,” Dave said. This was not a question. This was a prosecutorial opening statement, delivered with the precision thirty years of corporate practice trains into a man. Dave knew that the most effective arguments begin with facts the defendant cannot dispute.
“I’m telling my story,” I said. “Gop’s a co-star.”
“Bullshit.” Dave didn’t look at me. He was looking out at the endless black ribbon of the I-15, at the headlights carving their narrow tunnel through the desert dark. “Nobody reads your blog because of you. They read it because of Gop.”
The Bastard.
I said nothing. Not because I didn’t have a response: I had several, ranked by combativeness, ranging from that’s not true to go fuck yourself, but because the silence I was deploying was the Driver’s silence: I am processing your input and will respond when I have determined the optimal counter-argument, which may take several miles.
“He’s the draw,” Dave continued. “The body. The personality. The ‘I lie you.’ The readers come for Gop. They stay because you’re a decent writer, sure. But they come for him. And what does he get?”
“He gets paid,” I said.
“What does he get?” Dave repeated it.
I tried. “He gets customers. Guys read the blog, they come to Bangkok, they off him. He makes money. Directly. From the blog.” I was building the case. It held up for about a mile. Gop had, in fact, acquired customers this way: men who’d walked into Hot Male with a printed photo, matching it against his tattoo, seeking the boy they’d read about on the internet. He’d told me about them. He’d been pleased. The blog had made him, in his word, famous, which in the Soi Twilight economy was a commodity more valuable than any single off fee.
“And what’s your cut?” Dave asked.
“My cut is the blog itself. The writing. The experience of telling it.”
“Your cut is you get to tell a story about a man whose livelihood is his body, and you profit from it in attention, in readership, in the ego stroke of a thousand comments telling you how great your writing is. And what does he get?” Dave let the question hang, an actorly beat that I would have respected if I weren’t the one being cross-examined. “He gets to keep being the product. Except now he’s your product too.”
I took the cruise control off, which does not sound like anything unless you know me. I wanted the pedal under my foot. The vents were blowing cold on my knuckles and every set of oncoming headlights lit up the night’s insects smeared across the windshield.
“And you’d know,” I said. “Four hundred an hour for as long as I’ve known you, and I sat at your dinner table while you did twenty minutes on some poor bastard’s divorce. Did he get a cut? Anybody ever get a cut of a Dave story?”
“Every one of them signed a retainer,” Dave said. He did not raise his voice. He never has to. “They knew my price and they hired me anyway. Show me Gop’s signature.”
Mile marker 230. Silence. The desert.
“That’s a pretty harsh way to put it,” I said.
“I’m a bastard,” Dave said. “It’s what I do.”
III.
Dave’s moral compass I trust more than my own. A lesser man would have made his point and let it hang, trusting the guilt to accumulate interest over time. Dave wanted returns on his investment before we hit Bakersfield.
“Pull off,” he said, outside Mojave.
I put the blinker on, which between us is the same thing and has been for thirty years. I took it to the edge of the Chevron lot, away from the pumps, and killed the engine. The AC went with it and the heat came up through the floor inside a minute.
Here is what a road does for you. It gives your eyes a job. It gives every answer a deadline, because a car at ninety is always about to arrive somewhere and the somewhere lets you off. A Chevron lot in Mojave at three in the morning has a chain-link fence, a dumpster, a sodium lamp with its own weather of insects, and a man in the passenger seat with nowhere to be.
Dave got the belt off and turned in the seat to face me, his back against the door, one knee up on the console. He had not looked at me once since Baker. He did it now and did not stop.
“Go ahead,” he said. “You’ve been drafting since Barstow. I can hear it from here.”
I had been. I had three of them loaded and ranked and the top one was good. I gave him the top one: that the blog is mine, that the sentences are mine, that a man does not owe a licensing fee to the people who happen to be standing in his life, and that by his arithmetic every memoirist who ever drew breath was running a sweatshop. Ninety seconds. It was the best version of it I have ever produced, and I have produced it in the shower and in the car and at three in the morning in a bed in Culver City with nobody in the room.
Dave let all of it land. Then he did not answer any of it.
“Does he know how many people read it?”
“He knows there’s a blog.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
It was not. Out past the station a truck went up through its gears on the 14 and got small and the insects went on working the lamp, and the seat was hot under my legs, and there was nowhere to put my eyes except a man waiting.
“Ask him,” Dave said. “Next trip. Ask him what he thinks the number is, and then tell him the real one, and watch his face. You do that and still tell me it’s your story, I’ll drop it. Tonight, and for good.”
I did not take it.
That is the whole of it. I have taken every bet anybody has ever put in front of me, I took five hundred dollars off this man on Saturday over a fight neither of us could call, and I sat in a Chevron lot in Mojave with the engine off and would not take that one, because I already knew what his face would do. Knowing it was the same as saying it. Dave sat there and watched me know it and had the decency not to say so, which is the only mercy he extended all night.
“Okay,” I said.
“Okay what.”
He was going to make me say the whole of it. He always does.
“So what do you want me to do?”
“Monetize the blog.”
“Fuck you.”
“Monetize. The. Blog.”
“I hate that word.”
“I know you hate that word. I used it specifically because you hate it. It’s the right word. You are extracting value from Gop’s story and not compensating him. That’s exploitation.”
“It’s not exploitation.”
“Exploitation dressed up as affection. Which is worse, because at least a straight exploiter has the decency to be honest about it.”
Sixty posts, or seventy, or a hundred. His body, his laughter, his sulks, his T-shirts, his mangled English, rendered into prose and given to the internet for nothing. He sounds amazing. Does he really look like that? Your blog is the reason I booked my flight. And Gop proud of it, proud that a farang had written him down, asking me every few trips with a studied nonchalance whether there were new ones.
But Dave was right. Dave was a bastard, and Dave was right, and the two ran together, his bastardry the delivery mechanism for a truth I’d been avoiding with the same practiced skill I used to avoid the question of what I was really doing in Bangkok two or three times a year.
“Okay,” I said. “What’s the plan?”
Dave grinned at me in the sodium light like a wolf that has just won a negotiation and is already thinking about the work.
“Donate button,” he said. “PayPal. On the blog. Readers who’ve enjoyed the story, who’ve benefited from the information, who’ve offed him because of your posts. They can kick in. All proceeds go to Gop.”
“For what?”
“For whatever he wants. Food for his family. Gym membership. The bodybuilding thing.”
I considered. The idea was not bad. It was, in fact, good, which was infuriating, because twice in one night constituted a pattern, and acknowledging a pattern was not a precedent I wished to establish.
“I’d need to figure out what to do with the money,” I said. “If I just hand Gop a pile of cash, he’ll spend it on something ridiculous.”
“Food for his family?”
“Something frivolous.”
“Like food for his family?”
“Point taken.”
“The bodybuilding sponsorship,” Dave said. “That’s what he wants, right? The competitions. The registration fees, the supplements, the coaching. You set up the fund for that.”
“You’re monetizing my boyfriend’s traps.”
“I’m monetizing your guilt. Different math, same invoice.” He didn’t slow down for it. “It gives him something to work toward. It keeps his body in shape, which, let’s be honest, benefits you. And it gives the readers a reason to donate, because they’re not just tipping a bar boy, they’re investing in his future.”
“Since when did you become Gop’s financial advisor?”
“Since you started pimping him out on the internet without a revenue-share agreement.”
The Bastard.
I started the car. He got his belt back on and faced front and we pulled out onto the 58 with the deal made and the paperwork still open, which is a different quality of silence from the one we had driven in on.
IV.
The 58, coming down out of Tehachapi at ten past five in the morning, four hours downstream of Baker and ninety minutes of it spent in that lot. We’d taken the long way, because Dave would rather add three hours than sit still for one. Behind us the sky had gone the color of weak tea and the first of it was catching the windshield. The outskirts of Bakersfield, where the desert gives way to the irrigated grid of the Central Valley, the air thickening with the smell of fertilizer and the existential melancholy of a town that exists primarily so that other towns can feel better about themselves.
The Donate button would go up. The funds would go to Gop. The blog, which had started as a journal and become a chronicle and was now, apparently, a revenue-generating platform for a Thai bar boy’s bodybuilding career, would enter its next phase.
“Good,” Dave said. “I’ll email Gop and tell him.”
“You’ll what?”
“I’ll email him. Let him know.” Dave’s tone was already past the deal, into signatures and handshakes, the assumption that all parties were aligned and the only remaining variable was execution.
“You don’t email Gop. I email Gop.”
“You email Gop to tell him about things you want him to know. I’ll email Gop to tell him about things you don’t want him to know but should.”
“That’s manipulative.”
“That’s The Bastard’s job.”
I looked at him. He was grinning, having won not just the argument but the moral high ground, and enjoying a view he does not often get.
“Fine,” I said. “But I’m naming the fund.”
“Deal.”
I kept both hands on the wheel. The I-15 had become the 58 and the 58 had become the 99, the desert had become farmland, and by an arithmetic nobody in the car had proposed out loud and only one of us was performing, the five hundred dollars Dave had dropped on the fight on Saturday was now seed money for a man neither of us could explain to our accountants. And Gop was asleep, or on stage, or at the gym, or standing shirtless in front of a mirror doing his forty-five-minute routine, unaware that two men in a car on the wrong side of the planet were arguing about his financial future over the corpse of a Vegas bet and the smell of Bakersfield fertilizer.
Dave read my silence the way he always did, thirty years of practice behind it, and reached over. His hand found my thigh, not sexually, not provocatively, but with the simple weight of a man anchoring a friend. He squeezed once and let go.
“You’re a good man,” he said. “You’re just also a dick.”
“I’m American,” I said. “Same thing.”
He laughed. I laughed. Bakersfield went by on both sides.
Dave and I have slept together, more than once, as old friends who have lately discovered they share a sexuality sometimes do, and it has never once been mistaken by either of us for romance. It is recreational and it is competitive and it is one of the few things left that we do not analyze.
I unzipped my jeans. “You know the rule for road trips over eight hours.”
“You’re disgusting.”
“And you’re The Bastard. We’ve established our roles. Now put your mouth to better use.”
He did.
He undid the seatbelt first, which on the 99 at that hour is its own small statement, and got himself across the console with the graceless efficiency of a big man in a small space. The windows were down. The valley air came through carrying cow manure and irrigated alfalfa and I got the first of him in the same breath as both.
The thing nobody tells you about being driven at is that you cannot go anywhere. I could not stop. I could not turn and look. I could not take the thing over and run it the way I run everything, and so my whole attention split down the middle and stayed split, half of it on the lane markers coming up at seventy in that flat early light and half of it four inches to the right of my hip. It made everything slower and much worse.
For four hours that mouth had been taking me apart. It had audited my readership and priced my co-star and announced an email I had not agreed to and told me I was a good man and a dick. Now it was busy. That was the entire content of my head somewhere north of the Grapevine: I have just lost an argument about a man whose labor I do not pay for, and I am taking some.
I put my hand on the back of his head. He let me. Neither of us said anything for the next forty miles.
I did not have a name for what I had just agreed to and I still do not.
From the Blog, posted eight days later
Show Your Lub
In Which a Blow Job Outside Bakersfield Results in a Financial Innovation
Dave ruined a perfectly good road trip by being right, which is his signature move and has been since about 1987, and the mechanism is always the same: he waits until you are hours deep in the desert in the middle of the night, and then he says the obvious thing you have been stepping around for three years, and then he makes you pull over and shut the engine off before he will finish it, because a moving car is an escape hatch and Dave has never once left me one. [no photo of Dave, he’d have my head. picture a large man who is right.]
The truth in this case being that I have been using Gop’s life as content for three years and have not paid him a cent.
My rebuttal was that this is my blog, my words, my perspective, Gop is a recurring character, and so on, and it lasted about six minutes, which coulda been worse, and then Dave took it apart with the same efficiency he once used to reorganize my filing system while I was in the shower, uninvited, alphabetically. “Nobody reads this thing because of you,” he said. “They read it because of Gop. You’re the narrator. He’s the show.”
The Bastard.
So I fell back to my secondary position, which is that I already support Gop financially and surely that covers his literary appearances, and this one he did not dignify with words at all. He reached across the console and started giving my crotch the attention I’d been angling for since Tehachapi, and kept talking the whole time, laying out a sponsorship model for the bodybuilding, and somewhere between his second paragraph and my belt buckle I agreed to whatever it was he was saying. Then he mentioned he’d already drafted the email to Gop. THEN he put his mouth to a more productive use and the matter got settled north of the Grapevine. I would like the record to show that I resisted. I did not resist.
Anyway. There’s a Donate button now.
I woulda preferred a strategic plan, or at bare minimum a fund name that doesn’t sound like a GoFundMe for a stripper’s protein powder, but Dave is a man of action, which is a rich position for somebody who needed fifty-four years to work out what he wanted. Button went live before I’d finished the mission statement. Gop’s response, when Dave told him, was to start calculating the exchange rate on the spot, because Gop has always understood finance better than anyone gives him credit for, and his whole economic theory fits on a napkin: money comes in, money goes to things Gop wants. The invisible hand of the market is his hand. It is in my wallet. It has been in my wallet for years and I have never once asked it to leave.
The sponsorship part is real, though. Competitions cost money. Coaching, supplements, travel, entry fees. It feeds the ego, which is ravenous and runs on a caloric intake roughly equivalent to a small nation’s GDP, and it keeps the body in competitive condition, which benefits me in ways I am not going to enumerate but which you can work out on your own. Huh. Reading that back, it ain’t all that flattering to either of us.
So. If you’ve come to lub Gop even half as much as I have, if any of this has been useful, or entertaining, or got you on a plane, and I know some of you have offed him off the strength of these posts because you have written to tell me so, then show your lub and hit the button. Any amount. Keep in mind his tastes run to the expensive end of whatever you are currently picturing.
I thank you. Gop thanks you. And The Bastard will undoubtedly thank you too.
