Light Before Day by Christopher Rice Page A

disgust you find only inside this kind of meat market.
    By the time the men's room door opened, I was blinking back tears. When my vision cleared, I saw that my flask sat on the counter in front of me, and the attendant was resting his butt against the edge next to it.
    "Who died?" he asked me.
    "A friend of mine," I said.
    He nodded gravely. I noticed that the top three buttons of his shirt were undone, revealing the scoop of a white tank top underneath and a small gold chain that disappeared under it. "I forgot to mention something out there," he said. "Your mouth may smell like a bar at three A.M., but the rest of you smells good. Real good." He was trying his best, but I could tell he had never hit on a guy in a men's room before and it put a slight dent in his rigid demeanor. "Don't drink so much," he said, lapsing back into brigadier general mode. "I've seen what it does to people's eyes. I like your eyes."
    He walked out of the bathroom with a straight back and a determined gait that would have parted an army. When I went back outside, I saw that he had been replaced by another attendant, and when I asked the cashier where he had gone she told me that he got off at two P.M. She also told me his name. Corey.
    Although Tommy Banks had given me the day off for Paul's funeral, he forbade me from having a lunch break that took me any farther than the coffee shop in our building's lobby. I visited the car wash several times over the next few weeks hoping to catch him again, but I didn't, and I was too embarrassed to press the other staff for information about him.
    On the last Saturday in April, Rod dragged me to a party down in Laguna Beach, hosted by an entertainment attorney we had never met who owned a two-story white clapboard house that sat perched on stilts above a slice of craggy beach. The balcony was crowded with goggle-eyed, gum-smacking muscle boys in tank tops and cargo shorts. My stomach dropped when I saw Corey leaning against the rail.
    He was gripping a water bottle in one fist, and the swells of his chest strained against his white T-shirt. He was wearing the thin gold chain I had noticed at the car wash, and I could see a tiny medallion at the end of it. As I approached him, I saw what held his attention. In a Jacuzzi gurgling several yards away, a lanky older man in a blond beehive wig and a bikini stuffed with socks lip-synched to the pounding dance track. Every few seconds he lost his footing, and all you could see was the top of the beehive sticking out of the bubbles.
    "You know that guy?" Corey asked me.
    "The drag queen?" I asked.
    He shook his head and pointed a finger at Scott Koffler. Koffler was standing on the other side of the Jacuzzi, his arms around two ruddy-faced adolescents whose wide-eyed stares suggested that the last party they had attended had faculty monitors and a crepe-paper-strewn dance floor. "I hear those boys he's with are too young," Corey said.
    "Me too," I answered, hoping he would change subjects.
    "I hear the guy's basically a pimp," Corey continued, with what sounded to me like a mix of fascination and disdain. "He brings those kids to parties and sets them up with rich guys."
    "I stay away from Scott Koffler," I said. I figured he was probing me to see what kind of guys I ran with, and whether a creep like Scott Koffler was one of them.
    Now I had his full attention. "Who did you come with?" I asked.
    "No one," he said. "Some guy who came into the car wash the other day invited me. He said I'd be a big hit." He didn't smile or act bashful about what he had said; he was not bragging but flatly communicating a fact. "But I only came 'cause I thought you'd be here." His voice lacked guile and his expression remained impassive. "I forgot to tell you something the other day."
    "What?" I asked.
    "I'm sorry about your friend."
    "You drove all the way down to Laguna to tell me that?"
    "No," he said. He placed his hands on my cheeks and brought our faces together until our noses