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Stonewall: Stories of Gay Liberation 93

“Does that make you scared of me?”
“Do you have it on you?”
“No.”
“Then you don’t scare me. Your gun scares me. I don’t like guns.”
“Sometimes you have to scare people. Terror’s the only thing
they respect. If you scare them, you get their undivided attention.”
“Whyn’t you finish up,” Floyd was changing the subject, “read-
ing that magazine.”
“Sure,” Robert said. “So far I like it fine. It’s your best one yet.”
Floyd took a last few snips here and there around Robert’s ears,
then tried to gentle him down, and sidle on in, seductively rubbing
Robert’s neck with an electric massager. He was surprised to find
very little tension in Robert’s neck and shoulders. “You’re a cool
customer,” he said, “as cool as a cucumber.”
Suddenly, Robert sat bolt upright in Floyd’s barber chair. He held
it in his hands: a black-and-white photo graph on an unnumbered
magazine page. It was the picture he had spent his life looking for:
magazines in one hand, razor blade in the other. The photo was of
a man seated alone. On either side of the photo were separate single
shots of athletic women. The one on the left held a golf club. She was
set to putt and her breasts hung down between her stiffened arms.
The naked woman on the right held a jaunty tennis racquet. But
it was the naked athlete in the middle photo who mesmer ized him
as much as if he’d found a snapshot of his real father, the original
missing person, whom he had never seen.
He was seated, stretched slightly back straddling a locker-room
bench. He was a little older than Robert, and bigger, very blond,
with a fully developed chest over his washboard abdomen. His thick
wrists connected his athlete’s hands to his powerful arms. He wore
football pads across his broad shoulders, and a football helmet, and,
between his casually spread legs, he was erect. His eyes looked directly
from the helmet into the camera and directly out of the page into
Robert’s face. The face-guard on the helmet covered his mouth. No
New Testament word of mercy could spring from those Old Testa-
ment lips that Robert knew were set, mean and hard and without
©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved
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