Kings and queens and criminal queers

I’m working closely with two characters in particular lately, named Dan Crowley and Casey Way.

Dan is a quiet guy from New Jersey who got himself an English degree and not much else. He’s tall and blond and average all over, the kind of guy you’d take home just to show your mom you don’t just date guys with tattoos. He’s working a job at an office. He sits behind a desk all day, far away from sunshine. He doesn’t really care about his job but he needs it pay off the English degree he doesn’t use, because those student loans are a bitch. His girlfriend Sarah is too pretty, too smart, too rich for him. She’ll get tired of him one day, Dan doesn’t kid himself about that, but for now they see each other on weekends while she pursues her masters in anthropology. It’s better that way, because her parents hate him and marriage is the last thing Sarah wants from a guy like Dan.

Dan doesn’t say much. When he does, people don’t seem to listen anyway. They tune him out, or tell him what he really thinks, what he really meant to say. He goes through life with a muzzle, unsure of what to say or do next, because it’s not like anybody will care anyway. Dan gets kind of tired of it, but what can he do? He is the Quarter-Life Crisis in a short-sleeved dress shirt and clip-on tie.

Dan doesn’t make enough money to get sick. He doesn’t make enough money to do much else but spend Friday nights alone, watching cable TV shows and drinking beer in his crappy apartment that he pays too much for. He certainly doesn’t make enough to go to the hospital, so when he wakes up to find a parasite on the end of his tongue, Dan’s life stops with a terrible grinding sound.

What ensues is a surreal story about a man and the psychic parasite riding shotgun in his esophagus. It’s kind of a love story, I think, about a man who finds he has so much more to say once he can’t say anything at all.

Then there’s Casey Way. Casey is a night-person. He hasn’t slept at night since he was fifteen so he works instead. When you sleep during the day, it’s easy to lose track of time. Sometimes Casey loses more than just a calendar day. Sometimes he sleeps when he doesn’t mean to, in little snippets of dreams and micro-naps, when he’s had too much coffee and can’t remember the last time he slept.

Casey’s a small guy, not much to look at unless you’re into big (read: sleepless) blue eyes and a full mouth frowning around a cigarette or a swallow of coffee. He’s little scruffy around the edges and kind of likes to control things, which is why his boyfriend moved out on him for being a dick. Now Casey leaves long fucked up messages on his answering machine before dawn, when he really means “I’m sorry and I love you and just come back, okay?”

Everybody leaves Casey in the end, except for his step-sister Mariska. So when Casey comes home from work one night to find a box made of skin and human teeth sitting on the bus-top bench on 34th and Rose Avenue, Mariska is the only one who returns Casey’s phone calls. Scrambling across his kitchen floor at four in the morning, when the box opens up in a trap with a throat in the middle and a lashing tongue that tries to swallow him whole, Casey’s going to need all the help he can get.

This is the company I’ve been keeping. It’s going to be a fun party.