30: The Trouble with Ron

Originally emailed on Dec. 3, 1999

Last Saturday morning I rolled out of bed late and immediately attended to the essentials: pee, brush teeth, check e-mail. I got no personal e-mail (that's your fault), but there was a good bit of overnight traffic on a local lgbt list-serv. The first message -- subject line: Matthew Shepherd Again?!?!!?! -- said that a young, out gay man had been assaulted outside one of the local gay bars and was hospitalized in serious, perhaps life-threatening, condition. The e-mail had been written late the night before, less than an hour after the assault had taken place. The author wanted people to sign up for shifts to keep an all-night vigil outside the hospital, but there were no takers. I guess not many people are willing to sign on for an 2-4 a.m. vigil shift when they check their e-mail after coming home from the bar at one in the morning.

There was another post later -- subject line: M. Shepherd? Hardly! -- which purported to clarify the previous message. According to it, both the victim and the assailant were patrons of the bar, apparently lovers, and they'd had a domestic dispute in the parking lot. The victim had several broken ribs but would survive.

"I know both of them," a third writer chimed in. "They weren't lovers; they'd just met that night. I think they were going home together, but then what would they fight about in the parking lot?"

"I heard they were doing a drug deal and it went bad," another writer said.

"Well, whatever they were doing, it's going to look bad for the gay community that there was gay-on-gay violence at one of the bars," yet another person piped in. "It won't help that the victim wasn't exactly a choirboy. And, for the record, he didn't have broken ribs; he had a broken wrist."

"That can't be right; they don't put a person in ICU for a broken wrist, and I definitely heard from a cop who was on the scene that the guy was in ICU," the original post-er said.

At this point, I deleted the rest of the messages un-read and logged off. I wandered downstairs, where Ed was drinking coffee and reading the paper. "Honey," I asked him, "did you see anything in the paper about a gay man getting beat up last night outside Club Rainbow?"

"Oh, yeah," he said. "It's big news. Front of the Local & State section."

"Can I have it? The list-serv is running amok with half-baked ideas and unfounded rumors, so maybe just this once the Journal will have more reliable information than can be gotten elsewhere."

Ed handed over the paper. Sure enough, there was the headline: "Violence Erupts at Local Gay Hangout." As you can see, our local paper is a model of objectivity and restraint. The article said that two men had left the bar together, and one assaulted the other in the parking lot. The motive wasn't clear, but drugs were apparently not involved. A witness who had seen the two in the bar suggested that the victim might have reneged on a sex-for-money deal, but I didn't take that seriously, as the "witness" was probably one of the same know-it-all yahoos who had spent the night trading fabrications on the list-serv. The victim, a college student, was treated at the hospital for bruises and a broken nose, and was expected to be released first thing in the morning.

I read all of that with my usual semi-concerned detachment: "Oh, isn't that a shame, what's the world coming to, is there fresh cream cheese for my bagel?" Ed and I had finished breakfast and were in the car armed with a six-stop errand list when we heard the latest update on the radio news: the victim's family was refusing to talk to the media, but a source at the hospital had verified that the victim, who had been drinking at the bar, was not a student at the university, as he had told police, but was a seventeen-year-old high school senior.

Ed said quietly, "We'd better call Harriet."

I said, "Should we go home? Or stop at a payphone?"

"Go to a payphone," Ed said. "There's one at the 7-11, one block up if you take the next left."

I put on my turn signal and changed lanes. As we were waiting for the green arrow, I said, "It's not necessarily Ron."

"No, not necessarily," Ed said. The light changed. "Just probably," he added, as I accelerated.

Soon thereafter, we were in the living room at the Charming Contemporary Ranch, as we call Harriet, Nona, and Miriam's new house. Harriet, Ron, Nona, and Miriam were all present. Ron was indeed the alleged victim of the previous night's assault, and he did indeed have a broken nose and an impressive fat lip. Otherwise he was fine. "Nobody punched me," he said. "I hit my face on the bumper of a car when I fell down."

"You fell down?" Harriet said.

"Well, the guy helped me fall down. But he didn't mean to. I mean, he was a jerk, no doubt. That's why I was walking away from him to go back into the bar. He grabbed my arm, it pulled me off-balance, and I fell down. I don't think he meant to hurt me."

"What do you think would have happened then, if your friends hadn't come out after you?" Harriet asked. "That was pretty lucky."

"Luck had nothing to do with it," Ron said. "I'd arranged with them to check up on me if I wasn't back in five minutes; we have a standing agreement. Anyway, the worst that would have happened is that the jerk and I would have shouted at each other for awhile, and I'd have given him his fucking ring back, and that would have been that."

"Don't talk like that in front of your grandmother," Harriet said.

Miriam, the grandmother in question, said simultaneously, "He'd given you a fucking ring?"

"Literally!" Ron laughed. "I went out to his car with him because he said he had a present for me. It turned out to be this cheap-ass gold ring, totally plateware. 10-karat plating exactly one micron thick on a core of Mystery Metal. Tuh-rashy. He thought I'd be so dazzled by its shining brilliance that I'd do him on the spot. Loser."

"You could tell it was only plated from looking at it in a dark parking lot?" I asked incredulously.

"You mean you couldn't?" Ron answered, equally incredulous.

"And to think I paid 75 bucks to have my engagement ring appraised," I said to Ed.

"Do you still have the ring?" Harriet asked Ron, giving me a stick-to-the-subject look.

"No way," Ron said. "I'd have dropped it down a sewer by now except the cops wanted it. I told them, 'Girlfriends, you've got to hold out for quality,' but they insisted, so I gave it to them. Turns out the guy had this little stash of stolen jewelry in his trunk and the ring was part of it."

"Did you know the guy?" Harriet asked.

"I'd seen him around a couple of times. Last night was the first time I'd ever talked to him."

"It didn't strike you odd that he wanted to give a present to a boy he'd just met?" Harriet asked.

"Sister, it would have struck me odd if he hadn't," Ron answered.

"Would you have done him if the ring had been solid gold?" Harriet asked coldly.

"I'm not a prostitute, if that's what you want to know," Ron answered.

"That's only part of what I want to know. If he hadn't been a jerk with cheap jewelry, but a suburban cruiser with a spare solid-gold ring in the trunk of his Lexus, would you have done him?" Nona put a gently restraining hand on Harriet's thigh.

Ron sighed. "This is how it works with me. Say he'd given me a nice piece of jewelry. I'd have put the ring on, squealed like a girl, and said, 'Oh, thank you, it's so darling.' Then I'd have kissed him on the cheek, led him by the hand back into the bar and onto the dance floor, spent the rest of the night feeding him just enough sugar to keep him buying drinks and hoping, and then slipped away in such a way that he'd think it was somehow his fault we got separated in the crush. The next time he saw me, he'd apologize, I'd forgive him, and we'd play the game again."

"I can't believe there are many men around with quality jewelry to throw away on boys they meet in bars," Harriet said.

"Not so many as one might wish, certainly," Ron answered. "I'm often reduced to squealing in delight over Pokemon key chains, my umpteenth set of Freedom Rings, or even an expensive drink with an umbrella or a cherry on a plastic sword: 'Oh, how darling!' It keeps me limber forthe big stuff."

"You seem to think all of this is some kind of joke," Harriet said.

"Isn't it?" Ron asked.

Harriet stood up and walked into the kitchen. Nona, Ed, Miriam and I exchanged quizzical glances, then stood up and followed her. "My little brother has no sense of right and wrong," Harriet said quietly when we came in. "He sees people as vending machines. He's incapable of genuine emotional attachment."

"He's scared," Ed said, "and the rest is just a cover-up. He's seventeen years old and for all intents and purposes he's been taking care of himself since he was thirteen. He does that by hustling, and he knows it's dangerous -- that's why he arranged for his friends to check on him. Last night the danger got real and landed him in the hospital. His parents refused to come see him or accept phone calls, and he was interrogated by the cops. After a lonely night, he was retrieved from the hospital by his older sister, who brought him home and questioned him in front of a panel of witnesses, all of whom participated in making him feel that his lifestyle is freakish and his injuries are his own fault."

We were silent for an uncomfortable moment. Harriet said, "I'm fed up. If you have so much empathy for the little sociopath, you can talk to him."

"OK," Ed said, and went back into the living room. A minute later he popped his head into the kitchen and said, "Ron and I are going to go get some lunch at a restaurant where everything they serve can be sipped through a straw. Then I'm going to take him back to his apartment. Do you want us to drop you at home first, Ella?"

"Sure," I said. "I can pick up your car and do the errands, unless you want me to hang around for awhile, Harriet."

"No, that's OK," she said. "Call me later, though."

"I will." I kissed and hugged her, hugged Nona and Miriam, and followed Ron and Ed out.

There has been much fallout from Ron's adventure: a local media frenzy about a gay bar letting a 17-year-old drink, and many letters to the editor on the subject of violent pedophiliac jewel-thieving gay men, which are apparently the norm. Also, at his hearing on Wednesday, the judge refused Ron's petition to become an emancipated minor, arguing that his lifestyle, as revealed by this recent episode, shows him to be an "at-risk" teen. She did agree with him that his parents' home is not a suitable environment ("indeed, one suspects that inadequate parental care and supervision have played an important role in the development of your anti-social activities, young man"). None of Ron's other relatives can take him in. Harriet's heart is hardened against him still, and Miriam is willing but unable since her house is also Harriet's house. Therefore, the judge remanded him to the care of the state, and he has been living with a foster family since Wednesday evening.

I called them yesterday to say that Ron usually baby-sits for my son on alternate Saturday afternoons, and that tomorrow is one of his days. Could I expect him? They agreed that he could baby-sit Sammy, as long as I pick him up and drop him off, and tender any pay directly into their hands, to be doled out as they see fit. They've got him on a short leash, all right. A part of me thinks it's a good thing, but a part of me is sad, like Ron is the last surviving specimen of a rare and beautiful species of bird, and he's just been captured.

30: The Trouble with Ron

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