Petty Criminals

by Drew Anderla

photo by Arry Yan on Unsplash 

There was a shitty bar I used to go in the East Village to that was demarcated only by a red neon rooster in the front window. Before 11, there would be disco music playing and red lights illuminating the space, but rather than dancing, or drinking, or even making eye contact, men would just pool around the perimeter of the room obsessively checking their cell phones. It was decidedly less like a bar at this early hour than it was like the DMV, with everyone anxiously waiting for their number to be called.

At 11 on the dot, the bouncer would pry open a door you could easily have missed, and the pool of pitiable men would drain down the stairs, falling a little too hard over the last short and uneven step, into a dark, tunnel-shaped basement. There, on a sunken dance floor lit by the same red as the neon rooster in the upstairs window, they formed clusters that shuffled about like amoebas and continued not to speak and not to dance. They seemed to be following a set of rules that to the outsider would be difficult to pinpoint, passed down as they were from the days of police raids. 

During my first years in the city, I spent a decent amount of time there. With friends, yes, but just as often alone. I’d let myself fall into the mob, get picked up and taken back to some nearby apartment. Or I would just let myself be the center of one of those little groups. What joy to be watched, to wait for an alarm signaling my arrest. But the alarm never came, and I went home sweaty and smirking, as though I had gotten away with something that men had been getting away with for decades. 

Other nights I would play the voyeur, pick a spot, and watch what happened. I got used to seeing the same people lurking around. A muscley blonde guy I once invited over to fuck me while I slept; an older doctor who liked to give guys erotic physicals; a pair of lesbian documentarians who sat at the bar upstairs; a man who always said he was visiting the city on business but whom I knew to live around the corner from me; a quite famous writer and his much younger boyfriend. 

One night, I stood near the top of the step down to the dance floor and watched, here and there a glimpse of a jockstrap, a pair of pants around a pair of ankles. Like Jane Goodall, I made note of the way the clusters migrated and merged with each other: that one average-looking person might move and bring no one with, but that a 22-year-old twink would move and bring alone the whole crowd. 

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a trio step through the door. They were an elderly man of nearly 80 flanked on either side by two beautiful, dark-haired boys, certainly brothers, of perhaps 25 in nearly identical all-black outfits. The dark-haired boys helped their elderly third down over the uneven last stair and directly onto the dancefloor without exchange or negotiation. 

I once met, in a Provincetown restaurant, a gay couple with a forty-year age gap—the younger man was closer to me and the older was nearing 70. On the two of them the age discrepancy looked chic. They wore fantastic clothes and shared a passion for Leonard Bernstein. I joined them for dinner the next night and we laughed about our favorite Bette Davis line readings, almost screaming, “I’d like ta kiss ya, but I just washed ma hair.” Each was born in the wrong era—one too early, one too late—and here they had found each other, mystically, in the nick of time.  

The trio in the basement bar had none of that romance. Instead, one got muddled impressions of sweetness and fragility, opportunism and menace. The way the two younger men guided the older to the far end of the room, where the clusters had now merged into one giant mob on a small, elevated platform. With an arm on each arm, they helped the man up onto the stage and into the mob, which made room for him. One of the boys rubbed his back as if to say, “It’s okay, go ahead,” and the other whispered in his ear. His short-sleeved, seersucker shirt glowed in the red light. I watched the scene for a while until the trio sunk deeper into the mob and I lost sight of them completely. 

The basement was eventually so full and lawless that mere voyeurism was impossible. Every man who passed me brushed my hand or cupped my ass. My interest waning in everyone but the intergenerational triad I had lost track of, I retreated to the bar upstairs and sat talking for a while with the regular lesbian couple, always with an eye on the basement door so I wouldn’t miss the threesome as they headed out. Eventually, I spotted one of the boys emerge from the basement and excused myself from the conversation. 

On the street, he was smoking a cigarette, the comb of the neon rooster outlining his head. I’ve never been a smoker, if only because I don’t have the patience to nurture an addiction. But I always carry a pack of cigarettes and a lighter in case I need an excuse to talk to someone on the street. The trick is to always have a cigarette in need of a light, or a light in need of a cigarette. No one needs to know you have it all in your jacket pocket. I took out a cigarette and, after pantomiming that I couldn’t for the life of me find my own lighter, said, “Sorry, do you have a light?”

He looked at me with a smirk and tossed me a book of matches. I went through three of them trying to light the stupid thing and was about to give up when he motioned for me to come over to him. He grabbed the back of my head and pulled me toward him as if for a kiss, touched the end of his cigarette to the end of mine, and inhaled. When my cigarette was lit, he blew a long stream of smoke straight in my face.

“I’m Franny,” he said.

“How’s it going?” 

He shrugged and watched the traffic go by. 

I hate the feeling of trying to engage with someone who would probably pass my bleeding corpse on the side of a road. Starting a conversation feels pathetic, although decidedly less pathetic than standing around quietly. A friend of mine, one of those horrible people who can talk to anyone and fall asleep anywhere, once told me to just say whatever I was thinking as soon as it came into my head, because so few people ever speak honestly that the person you’re trying to talk to will be stunned into responding.  So I looked Franny in the eye and said, “What’s the deal with the old guy?”

He laughed, showing off crooked, yellowing teeth. “That’s Max. We call him our granddaddy.”

“As in—”

“As in faster, granddaddy. Kill, kill.”

“And the other guy?”
“My brother, Joe.” 

As he said this, he nodded at the door, which his brother and the old man were coming out of. The brother was, like Franny, still perfectly tucked and quaffed, but the old man was unkempt: shirt untucked in the back, pants sagging a bit, hair out of place near the brow. They eyed me suspiciously, and who could blame them? But Franny said, “He needed a light,” like a passcode.

Max put out his hand and I shook it. His skin was soft and pale and covered in age spots. A network of purple veins protruded from the tops of his hands. “Beautiful night, isn’t it?” He looked at me curiously, and held my hand much too long before Franny said, not to me:

“Should we bail?” 

“Let’s do it,” said Joe, who was looking me up and down.

“Why don’t you join us?” Max said to me, meeting my eyes and then winking. To my hesitation he responded, “Just for a drink. I promise we won’t keep you late.”

We cabbed some fifteen blocks west to an apartment building on Grove Street. Max sat behind the driver, looking out the window, Franny sat in the middle, and I sat on Joe’s lap. Joe was the more muscular of the two brothers. He had broad, hard thighs. As the cab stopped and started, Joe slid his hand in my pants. Instinctually, I pulled away, worried that maybe the driver would see. But Joe yanked me back to him as the cab stopped short at a light and the driver noticed nothing.

Like all apartment buildings in the West Village, Max’s building was at once stunning and decrepit. Marble floors in the lobby were here and there worn by the constant tread of Louboutins and combat boots, the hallway wallpaper was faded and peeling near the seams, and the gilded cage elevator that we took up to Max’s apartment on the top floor moaned as it pulled itself up. 

The apartment, on the other hand, was as fresh and young as any Williamsburg loft. The small entryway opened directly into a large living and dining room that looked out over the Hudson River. The room was sparingly furnished, the furniture giving way to several impressive abstract paintings that looked as if they were part of a real art collection, not plucked off the street or ordered from artprints.com. The only thing that struck me as remotely old-fashioned was an iron crucifix that sat on top of a small table below an icon of St. Francis of Assisi. But even these nods to antiquity felt modern in their abstraction alongside the art and the furniture and the exposed brick. Franny and Joe, who had the entire way from the cab to the apartment been talking loudly about rimming, unceremoniously kicked their shoes off. 

“Dad?” A voice yelled from somewhere in the apartment. 

“Julia?”

A woman in her mid-fifties came out of a room down the hall. She was tall and thin and held a book in her hand with a finger marking her spot. 

“You weren’t answering your phone.” 

She looked at us with less horror than I would have expected, as though she had walked in on this kind of thing before. Maybe there was a shade of shock in her right eye, but weariness and embarrassment were the primary colors. 

No one said anything for what felt like a long time. The brothers, huddled together like teenagers caught smoking a joint in a school parking lot, stared at Julia with clenched jaws. Max looked away from her before shuffling off into the living room, where he sat to take off his shoes. Julia heaved a short, harsh breath and placed a bookmark where her finger had been. “Dad? Hey—” she said as she followed him into the living room, where she sat down across from him. She went to take his hand in hers, but he pulled away and looked out the window. Somewhere down on the street a girl howled with laughter and a horn honked. Part of me wished I could be down with her, whoever she was, but the drama up here was so delicate and the tension so tight I didn’t dare move for fear of breaking it. 

“Dad, you have got to tell me where you’re going to be. I can’t keep doing this with you.”

“Hm?” An innocent sound from an old man.

“Chasing you around New York. I just don’t, god—” She looked over at the three of us and then at one of the paintings on the wall. 

“You just don’t what?” Max spat. 

“I don’t know, I just don’t trust that you’re with good people.”

“Oh yeah? Well, fuck you too you fucking bitch,” Joe muttered. Franny laughed and Max failed to hide a smile. In Max I saw a cruel disdain for his own daughter. He didn’t look her in the eye, and I’m sure it had nothing to do with embarrassment at being caught. I couldn’t help but agree with her mistrust. Here was a man who was parading around with two hustlers and a stranger they had picked up outside a divey sex bar. I felt this horrible pit in my stomach as I imagined her walking in on her father having sex with boys nearly a quarter his age. 

But then, well, I had liked Joe’s hand in my pants. I had liked Franny’s look as I approached him outside the bar. Even Max had a certain, okay, grotesque but sexy aura. So my feelings were not simple. Alongside my pity for her, I was—can I admit it?—furious that she was there. It irritated the shit out of me, if I’m honest, that she was making a fuss. It was like watching an old movie. You’re loving the movie, and even though there are some things about it that feel dated, you’re going along with the fantasy of it. And then someone comes on screen in blackface, and the whole thing falls apart. You can’t ignore what you’re looking at anymore, and you either turn the movie off, or finish it begrudgingly.

“I have always surrounded myself with good people,” Max replied finally. 

“Oh, shut the fuck up,” she sighed. For a few moments she sat on the couch opposite Max and looked around the room, her eye settling on a mirror in the dining room. “Hey, where’s the Krasner?”

“The what?”

“The Lee Krasner painting,” she repeated, nodding at the mirror. 

“I gave it away.” Stunned silence. Joe and Franny shifted awkwardly next to me. Now, embarrassment in Max’s face.

“What do you mean you gave it away?”

“I mean I gave it away. It’s my collection—”

“It’s as much mom’s collection and you know it.”

“I am generous with my friends, that’s all.”

“Dad, what are you talking about?” Max looked over at us. Julia gaped. “You are absolutely foul. They could be your grandchildren.”

“He just likes to watch,” barked Franny.

My instinct here was to run, but how do you leave a situation like this? How do you say, “You know what, I actually can’t deal with whatever this is, so I’m just going to go”? My mouth hung open, but no words came. Julia stared at me and in that moment, I needed her to understand that I wasn’t a part of this. Not that I mattered. When she talked about this with her therapist later, she wouldn’t be discussing me, she would be discussing her father and the vague shapes of three young men. My person would not factor into it. 

Without saying anything, Julia stood up and left before I could move. She shoved past me to get through the door, slamming it behind her. This read to me like a moment for an awkward silence, but instead Franny bustled off to the bar to mix drinks and Joe, like a cartoon, whistled his way to the bathroom down the hall. Max sat on the couch staring out the window and then, finally, said to me, “Well, are you staying or going?”
As the conflict dissipated, my curiosity returned. I am a coward, but not an idiot. I admired the art on the walls, all in muted neutral colors, except for one. It was an unfolded red bar napkin. In the lower left-hand corner was the bar’s name and address, upside down and boxed in black marker. In the righthand corner were the letters SAMO© and in the center of the napkin was a drawing of a bald man with tears streaming down his face and lines coming out of his head. To the left of the face were the words:

WHISKEY 

LIBERTY.

“This is gorgeous,” I said.

“Oh, that’s one of my favorites,” Max said to me. I turned to look at him as he spoke, and as he spoke, he became lighter and lighter. “One night, this must have been around 1979, I had walked from here over to a bar near Tompkins Park. Let’s see, 1979, Julia would have been about 19 or 20 and she was in art school here in the city and would stay with me on the weeknights and then go back up to her mother’s house in Westchester for the weekends. And this was one of those weeknights that she was here, and I couldn’t stand to be in the house with her. So, I walked over to a bar I had heard about and sat down next to a beautiful black boy who must have been about Julia’s age, and I thought about how they just get younger and younger, these boys. Well, what you learn living near a university is that they don’t get younger. The people around you are always the exact same age and you’re the one who’s getting older. But I never feel like an old man. I don’t like old men.

“And this boy, this gorgeous black boy, was alone, having been stood up by his friends. We talked for a long time, about God and sex and eventually about art.

“I recognized him, of course, had recognized him right away as one of Julia’s crowd, someone who would be big, though I didn’t realize how big. I bought him a drink, and a second drink, and eventually a third drink and when we ordered the third drink he asked if he could buy me one in return. His hand had ended up by then on my knee, and then my thigh, and what I wanted to say was, ‘Why don’t we go into that bathroom and screw?’ But instead, I handed him one of the bar napkins that had been sitting in front of me and said, ‘Draw me something.’”

He paused to light a cigarette—isn’t it amazing to see someone smoke inside an apartment these days?—and then pointed at the drawing. 

“Julia was furious that I would ask someone she knew to draw me something, but when he died, she said how glad she was that we had it to remember him by and that I was never to sell it. It would be a family heirloom.”

Franny came in the room with a pitcher full of martini and four glasses on a tray and blurted out, “God, is he telling you the fucking Basquiat story? We get it, dude, you know people.”

“He met Andy Warhol at Elaine’s!” Joe yelled over the flush of the toilet.

“Cy Twombly said he had a nice ass,” Franny howled back.

“Yeah, and I would have fucked Cy Twombly, you little cock fairies, except his goddam wife showed up.” The three of them exploded into a vicious, queeny laughter so infectious that I laughed too, snorting a half-dozen times. It was like laughing in church, at first silently, painfully, until finally, blessedly, the priest says something remotely funny for you to laugh at out loud.   

And while Max and Franny and I were still laughing, Joe, who was standing behind Max, took a bandana out of his pocket and, with great force, gagged Max with it, choking him until he went limp. 

“Jesus fuck!” I yelled. 

“Christ, don’t worry. He’s just passed out.”

“But what—” 

Joe picked up the old man with ease and sat him in a simple dining chair. Franny had meanwhile gone to a credenza in the hallway and pulled out several neatly coiled black ropes, which they quickly unwound and used to tie Max to the chair. They then undressed to matching black underwear and leather harnesses and demanded that I take off my clothes. 

“I don’t think—” I started to say before Joe hit me across the face. 

“Strip,” Franny said calmly. He was the gentler of the two and kissed the spot on my face that stung from Joe’s slap. I undressed slowly at first, then quickly when Joe came toward me as though to hit me again. Once naked, I was roughly arranged facing away from Max. They tied my hands behind my back so that I couldn’t touch myself or push them away. 

“Maaaxyyy,” whispered Franny, as he patted Max awake. As the old man came to, Joe spanked me, lightly at first, then with increasing intensity, and all the while he kept saying things like, “You like that, you old faggot? Yeah? You like that?” The twins took turns playing with me. Joe, his hands laced around my neck, pulled my head back as he fucked me so that I had no choice but to make eye contact with the crucifix across the room. An image of torture alongside all of these abstract paintings that expressed inexpressible delight. The cold iron crucifix, an image of a man at the point where the perpendicular axes of horror and pleasure meet. Quick, a memory: a broom closet at a Catholic school, where a boy I loved kissed me and let me feel his penis through his Abercrombie jeans. First, a blissful expression of identity; then, misery as he avoided me the rest of the summer. 

They flipped me over so that I was able to see Max. He had tears in his eyes that looked like joy. Franny got down on his knees and blew me until I came. He didn’t swallow, but rather sauntered over to Max, removed the bandana gag, and drooled me onto the old man’s panting tongue. “That’s a good boy,” Franny added, retying the gag as Max relaxed and slumped down into the chair.

The smell of after-sex is the same no matter where you are—a broom closet or a luxury apartment or a dive bar. Max’s apartment reeked of it, and I wonder how often Julia had walked into the putrid stench of sweat and pubic hair and fluid. How often had she gone to kiss her father and smelled the curious odor of a young man’s testicles on his breath? Now that I’d finished, I needed to run away. I could see only Julia, the ugliness of Max, Franny’s yellow teeth, and Joe’s pockmarked cheeks. Any glamour that I had assigned to the scene was gone, now singularly disgusting. 

The twins untied me and I dressed, all the while watching the still-bound Max doze off in his chair. My wrists were sore and marked red where the ropes had tied my arms back and together. I rubbed them as I said, “Is he gonna be okay?”

“Sure,” Joe shrugged, as though to say, “You’re so lame. We do this all the time.” 

Franny, though, looked at me and said, “You were great. Perfect.”

I laughed. How could you not? Though the whole encounter had felt spontaneous to me, it had been expertly directed by Franny and Joe, and so it didn’t actually feel like my behavior was my own, like I had to make any decisions or even be a real person. How could I have been bad when all I had to do was be thrown around? As I pulled on my shoes, Max stirred, suddenly opening his eyes wide, as though he had just come to in a foreign country, confused about where he was. A second of panic, then the realization he hadn’t moved and a quick glance around the room. I got up to leave but Joe said, “Hey, hold on a second.”

He went to the Basquiat drawing and pulled it from the wall. Max sat up erect as Joe brought the drawing over to me with a sneer and said, “Here.” Now, Max struggled against the ropes, more than he had all night, practically howling through the bandana with tears welling in his eyes. 

“I—” But I couldn’t imagine a reasonable thing to say. The sincerity of Max’s emotion indicated this was not the game I thought it was, so I did feel some guilt. No, I wanted to say, I couldn’t. But then, and here’s where I’m maybe a little gross, I was disgusted by Max. By an octogenarian fucking around with a bunch of twentysomethings, sure, but equally, maybe even more so, by this show of emotion. Stop crying, I felt like telling him.   

Franny was leaning against the wall near the crucifix, smoking a cigarette. He breathed out a flume of smoke and droned, like a bored oracle, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul?”

Max sobbing now, shaking his head in a desperate, wordless plea. 

“Now, Maxxy,” whined Joe in a horrible baby voice, “That’s not a very nice way to treat our new friend. Didn’t you like him? Didn’t you like his pretty little asshole? Didn’t you like how good he was for you?”

My skin crawled at the way he said it. I was reminded of effeminate villains in old movies who controlled criminal undergrounds with slight flicks of their wrists. But there was no James Bond and no white pussycat, just two accomplices and a sad old queer. Disgusted, I turned to leave when Franny whined, “Maxxy, what was our deal? Hm?”

Max whimpered and sagged back into his chair as Franny kissed his neck and whispered in his ear. Joe picked impatiently at his pinky nail with his thumb. Franny spoke softly to Max and, like hypnosis, Max calmed, calmed, and finally fell asleep. They unbound him. Joe, still naked save the harness, picked the old man up and took him down the hall to bed, cradling him like an infant. Franny and me, left alone. A moment of panic: What to say? But Franny picked up the framed drawing and handed it to me before I had to say anything, kissed me, and pushed me out the door without another word. 

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