Swish. Not swish. Camp. Not camp. It was like watching television while somebody flipped channels. Gregor took the man’s hand and shook it.
“Are you the pastor here? Or do I say priest?”
“Well, Dan’s a priest, technically, yes. I’m just a parishioner, and I do some work on church business when we need a hand, which we usually do. We don’t ever seem to have any money, and whatever we do have we must spend on the building. I mean, nothing else explains it. Most of the time I’m a freelance art director. I do food.”
“You do food?”
“Well, yes,” Chickie George said. “There’s a reason why the food in magazines all looks like it could hang in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and when you make the same recipe at home it doesn’t. I do presentations. Then the photographer comes in and ruins the whole thing with execrable lighting, but there’s nothing I can do about that but take a Prozac and get over it. Have we had a murder here? That’s what you do, isn’t it? You investigate murders.”
“Sometimes,” Gregor agreed.
Chickie looked up the street. “I suppose it’s too much to hope that somebody had finally decided to ice Rapid Roy, isn’t it? My hope has always been that one of his lunatic church members would just lose it one day, and there would be Roy, all over the ground in pieces. Probably be the best he ever looked in his life. Sort of like Jackson Pollock.”
“I’d heard he had a church on this street,” Gregor said. “But I don’t see a church.”
“That’s because there isn’t one. They’ve got a row house down there. Actually, it’s two row houses knocked together. Beautiful spaces, really, you could do something with them. But they haven’t.”
“How do you know? Have you been inside?”
Chickie George snorted. “If I’m going to commit suicide, I’m going to have some fun doing it. Give me sex, drugs, and rock and roll any day.”
“So how do you know they haven’t done something you might approve of with the interiors?”
“Because I can look in the windows and see the art. Christ dying on the cross, badly painted and as bloody as the victim in a slasher movie. Blood and death, that’s all they think about. And I used to think the worst of that kind of thing was those awful pins that said ‘My Boss Is a Jewish Carpenter.’”
“Do they wear pins?”
“If they did, they’d say ‘All Fags Burn in Hell.’ Do you know the Richard Pryor routine about the word ‘nigger’?”
“What?”
The swish was gone again, as gone as if it had never existed in the first place. Gregor found himself standing in front of a very serious young man, with as much force of personality as the Cardinal Archbishop of Philadelphia, and maybe as much determination.
“Richard Pryor,” Chickie George said, “went to Africa. And when he came back, he worked this thing into his routine. You can hear it on the Live on the Sunset Strip video. About the word ‘nigger’ and the way black people use it among themselves and think they’ve reclaimed it. That when they use it it doesn’t mean what it means when white people use it. Except it does, you see, and when they use it they’re really perpetuating it. So Pryor was trying to get people to stop using it, for black people not to call each other ‘nigger’ among themselves. If you see what I mean.”
“I think it’s pretty clear.”
“Yes. Well. I think we ought to do the same thing. The ‘Gay Community.’ Excuse me if I can’t say that with a straight face. I don’t mind ‘gay,’ but ‘community’ drives me bananas. Anyway, I’m beginning to think that we should stop using them. ‘Fag’ and ‘queer’ and all of that. That we’re never going to get rid of Rapid Roy and his friends until we do.”
“Ah,” Gregor said.
“It’s too bad somebody hasn’t murdered him, really. Death is what turns him on. Sometimes I think death is the only thing that turns him on.”
“I’ve never seen him.”
“Stand on the street long enough and you will. Especially if you stand here. He’ll throw up pickets before you know what’s happened to you. It’s cold out here. If you want to come inside, I could give you a cup of coffee. We always have excellent coffee, and French pastry. We don’t settle for cheese Danish from the supermarket at St. Stephen’s.”
“Thank you. I’m supposed to be meeting someone for lunch. I just wanted to get a look at the neighborhood.”
“Because of that mess that happened across the street, I suppose. Well, have a good time with it. And if you see our boy Roy, shoot first and ask questions afterward.”