A Gay Serial Killer
There comes a time in every straight man’s life where his highest priority should be a beard…
When I look back at this pic of Jay and I, I see the origins of a budding psycho.
His eyes were always dancing back then, his body always fidgeting, his face often flush with something like mischief trending towards anger, and his mind always in a state of disarray and chaos.
He was mostly the victim of aggressively oscillating brain cells, I imagined, brain cells that offered no clear plan of action most of the time but demanded near constant movement from him nonetheless.
The results were mixed.
One moment he might be offering a joke, the next harassing you into taking a shot, the next giving a sincere lecture about the nature of bodybuilding, the next spitting a beer in your face, the next shitting in a public sink…
And so on.
He was completely unpredictable.
The only constants were his perpetual movement, his rapid speech, his very active hands, and his red sweaty face.
On the other hand, when I look at myself in this picture, I see —
“A gay serial killer,” my friend Will said to me. “You see a gay serial killer.”
“Wait, a what?”
The pic is something like 20 years old, and it’s from a camping/wine tour event several of us embarked on to help my friend Mark celebrate his last remaining days of singledom.
A bachelor party.
“It’s just right up the road,” Jay told me when we set out for the camping site.
I was driving my Dad’s car then, a leased vehicle, so I was very wary of the mileage.
Jay knew this.
“Where the hell are we?” I kept asking. “Where is this place anyway? You said it was like a half hour away.”
“Just keep going,” he’d say. “It’s right up the road here…”
When we arrived two hours later, Jay offered no explanations or apologies. He just cracked open a couple beers — taking one for himself and one for me — tapped his bottle against mine, said “cheers”, and immediately began spreading his unique brand of charm amongst the women in the neighboring campsites…
After introducing himself to everyone there with impeccable politeness and offering our help in setting up their tents and so forth, he concluded by saying, “…and if you happen to have any cocaine you’d like to share, or if you happen to know anyone who does, that would be great.”
“Every man arrives at a day when common sense and a desire to have sex with women demands he refrain from shaving and grow out a beard finally,” Will explained to me after viewing this pic. “Or at the very least some stubble…”
“You’re flirting with it here in this pic,” he continued. “You look soft and boyish and pretty. Were you to find yourself in prison I’d be deeply concerned for the integrity of your asshole…
You need something to balance all that out properly — a beard.”
I couldn’t grow much of a beard back then, just spotty stubble. I thought it looked silly.
“Suit yourself then,” Will said. “Suffer with your G.S.K.S., but don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
“G.S.K.S.?”
“Yep. Gay Serial Killer Syndrome”
Some version of a limo was escorting us to these wine tasting locations — you can see it in the pic — but by the time we reached the third or fourth destination there was a large, burly man waiting for us there at the entrance.
The message was clear: we were no longer welcome.
It was hardly a surprise. Jay had taken to entering these places with a dramatic flourish, one that involved a long running start, a grand leap up onto the bar, and a very loud declaration of our presence. “Hello darling,” he’d say to the bartender. “The party has arrived! Four beers for my mates here please!”
“This is a wine bar sir…”
“Right, as I said: four beers for my mates here please!”
That was the running joke.
Will’s comment plagued me for months. I can be a little neurotic like that.
Every time I looked in the mirror I saw a gay serial killer staring back, begging me to grow some stubble.
Will’s an artist, and as an artist I trusted his sense of aesthetics. His observations were often pretty uncanny. If he said I looked like a gay serial killer, then maybe I did.
Even when I snapped out of it, I still kinda knew what he meant. When someone who has had a beard for ages shaves it off, what’s left is often a person who looks vaguely like your old friend minus any kind of facial character or symmetry.
It’s as if your old friend has been vaporized and replaced with an imposter … a rubber-faced, doughy-complected stranger whose once expressive face has been reduced to a blank, impassive mask.
If to all that you add a softness, a tan, and a certain kind of boyishness, you get, well, a “gay serial killer” kind of look according to Will.
Back then I sort of felt like Jay’s personal science experiment.
I was deeply insecure about how thin I’d been growing up, and to his great credit he’d encouraged me to start working out with him to sort of remedy that.
But I kind of overdid it.
Between all the calories I was taking in and my near constant presence in the gym, I blew up rather quickly.
Jay would often put heaping plates of pasta in front of me and implore me to eat. “Yes! Eat! Eat! That’s it!” And then he’d look upon me with a disturbing blend of awe and wonder as I wolfed it all down…like some kind of twisted Dr Frankenstein character.“Eat my boy! Yeeeessss! You’re growing by the day Mikey! Don’t stop!”
That’s Mark and I there, at the campsite. I’m the constipated looking one on the right.
“It’s a good pic,” Will said to me. “But you’d look better with a beard, frankly…
And look at your tiny hands! It looks like someone scrubbed out your fist and superimposed a toddler’s hand there! Holy hell, I’ve seen stumps bigger than that!”
I finally grew tired of Jay’s antics. Getting tossed from the wine tour was the final straw.
Staring at his red sweaty face in the limo on the way back to the campsite set something off in me, and I took an enormous swig of beer and spit it in his face.
He took it well, surprisingly, but I knew there’d be some form of retaliation eventually. I could keep an eye on him during the day, sure, but the man doesn’t sleep and I’d be vulnerable at night.
So we made a deal: I’d chew on some rocks for a few minutes and we’d call it even.
Here’s Jay, feeding me some rocks near the campsite:
Jay woke me up the next morning at around 6am. “Mikey, get up,” he said while tapping his beer bottle on my forehead. “I’m bored man.” Then he reached into the cooler and handed me a cold one.“Here, this’ll get ya going.”
The man hadn’t slept a wink and didn’t even look worse for wear. We’d drank ungodly amounts of beer the night prior and it seemingly had no effect on him whatsoever. In fact, he was still drinking.
His stamina was remarkable.
Crawling out of my tent, I watched in awe as he chased a stray cat around the campsite while double-fisting a couple Labatt Blues. He was still wearing the same blue button-up shirt and jeans from the day before. “Mikey, help me catch this cat, would you?
Me, I was barely functioning. I had a hangover for the ages, and a parched bone-dry mouth that wouldn’t allow me to communicate anything outside of some feeble croaking until I’d slugged a bottle of water or two. “I need some water dude…”
“Water?” Jay scoffed before taking a swig from his beer. “What a fucking pussy you are. Hey, grab that cat!”
Mark found a cocaine connection. It was just 20 minutes away from the campsite, Jay assured me. “Just keep going,” he said as I drove us there. It’s just up the road here…”
We arrived about an hour later.
The whole thing was a terrible idea, and I said so several times on the way there, and eventually on the way back. But I just couldn’t make a dent with anyone.
Cocaine’s euphoric high is followed by a suicidal, crushing depression. As Mark clearly stated before we even left, there was just enough coke for everyone to get a brief high, which meant we’d all be coming down while we were crammed in my little car on the way back to the campsite.
Predictably, tempers flared on the way back. “How about we all try and cheer up for Mark’s sake?” his brother lectured. “How about we all shut the hell up and relax a little…”
“How about I drag you outta this car and beat the fucking shit outta you,” Jay shot back.
I was pleased Jay spoke up there, but I still harbored some resentment towards him for being so gung-ho about this little mission.
In the future I’d learn to forgive Jay for these types of things. What I thought of as aggressively oscillating brain cells was really a form of clinical anxiety disorder, a crushing form that often caused him extraordinary grief and torment. I understood why he acted the way he did.
My Gay Serial Killer Syndrome paled in comparison to it, so I could hardly judge him. But I certainly had my own issues…
I have no problem whatsoever with anyone being gay, or looking gay — whatever that means — but I’m not gay, so I didn’t want to look gay. And I didn’t want to look like a serial killer either if I could help it…
But I was easily convinced, and after Will poked fun at my hands I spent the next several weeks demanding friends and acquaintances go palm to palm in order to demonstrate to myself that my hands weren’t so small after all. And I’m pleased to report that they’re not, thank you very much.
Jay had his anxiety to grapple with, I had my neuroticism, and there was a world full of people who were worse off to varying degrees. Compounding things with G.S.K.S. hardly seems wise if one can help it…
So I sport a beard these days, not a particularly impressive one (“It looks like someone sprinkled pubes on a manikin,” is how Will described it) but one that offers some semblance of masculinity. And it’s a relief too, because I have some sort of Peter Pan syndrome as well, causing me to look uncannily similar now as I did then, and a jail sentence would certainly mean the end of me…or the end of my asshole at least.
In the meantime I wait patiently for laugh lines and wrinkles to appear, or maybe some gray hairs. It’s getting a little weird now — I’ve even been accused of using botox.
But I just remind myself that there are far greater problems in the world, problems I’m not at all qualified to offer advice for. Besides, sometimes all we can do is chew on rocks and wait for things to get better, right?
