The Life and Adventures of Randy Mesmer

GAY BUSINESS.

Randy Mesmer was all in favor of loving men, and sucking cock, and being queer, but this business of being gay—and a business was what it was—seemed an abundantly bad idea.

As far as Randy could figure, some time in Seventies a gaggle of rich white guys had sat down-- over a meal of white wine, Cornish game hens, and crème brule--to figure out the most profitable way to stay consistently miserable.

Happiness was all well and good in theory, but there wasn’t much money to be made from it, not compared to misery, that wish-fulfilling cow.

(The cows and the wishes, alas, are always someone else’s.)

Someone was getting rich, you can be sure, from all the exotic varieties of underpants, from lemon vodka and eyebrow waxing, from all the money spent for rainbow flags and 501s, for six hours at the baths, for moisturizer, for timeshares in Provincetown, for self-defense classes, for temporary and permanent tattoos and penis enlargement, for colored contact lenses and ginseng supplements, for books of everyday affirmations, for realistic flexible washable models of horse penises, for cigarillos and Nicoderm, for gym memberships, for hair implants, for socks to match everything, for coke, for tina, for Marianne Williamson, for recovery bumper stickers, for poppers, for E, for bottles of water to go with the E, for retrovirals, for queer theology, for beard trimmers, for grapefruit-scented non-sticky water-soluble lube.

What use were you, if you were happy and had a man you loved? You stayed home and boned him all day and hardly spent any money at all.

This was to be avoided, at all cost.