“I'm always cute.It's a documented condition.Bye, Hallie.”And I hung up on her.And then—without deciding to, the way you scratch an itch you didn't know you had—my thumb found the yellow icon on my phone, and I opened it.
The grid filled the screen, square by loading square, and my breath actually caught.
Not because of what was on it.Because of how close it all was.The distances under the profiles weren't ticking up in miles the way they did back home in Richmond.They were in feet.Forty feet.Sixty.Ninety.A hundred and ten.A sea of headless torsos and blank gray squares, all of them stacked in the air around me in this beige tower, above me and below me and down every carpeted hall—a vertical city of desperate men, and I was in the middle of it.If every locked door on every floor had swung open at the same moment, the Lincoln Grand would've been the largest and saddest gay orgy in the history of the American Midwest.
And not one of them would have shown his face.
I stood up off the bed and rolled the dread off my shoulders, and a different feeling slid in to replace it—something sharper, warmer, a little reckless.
Well, I thought.Time to go find my big story.
And—the thought arrived uninvited, grinning—who knows.Maybe I'll get lucky while I'm down there too.
* * *
The hotel bar was called The Cornhusker Room, because of course it was, and it was doing the kind of business that would've made a Vegas sportsbook jealous.Standing room only.A wall of cheap suits three deep, a fog of cologne and bourbon, a noise level that had nothing to do with conversation and everything to do with hundreds of men talking at once so they wouldn't have to think.
I shouldered up to a sliver of open bar and caught the bartender's eye.
“Soda water, lime.”
He looked almost disappointed in me.I get that a lot.The truth was I had a rule, and the rule had kept me employed: nothing stronger than fizzy water until the story was in the bag.A drink was a loosened bolt, and at a thing like this you kept every bolt in your body torqued down tight.So I took my sad clear glass with its pathetic green wedge, turned my back to the bar, and let my eyes do the work.
It was all here.The deacon energy, and the political donor energy, the staffer energy—lanyards flipped backward so you couldn't read the org names, wedding rings catching the light, that particular too-loud laughter men do when they're standing very close to something they want and pretending to discuss the back nine.I slid my phone out, held it low against my hip, and thumbed off a few frames.Wide shots.The crowd, the bar, the lanyards, the rings.Nothing actionable yet.Set dressing, like Hallie said.But you photograph the set dressing because sometimes the set dressing is the story and you just can't see it yet.
Then, half on reflex, I opened Grindr again to check the distances— and the screen detonated.
A red badge on the messages icon.Not a one, not a three.Dozens of DMs.The number was still climbing while I watched, a little counter spinning up like a gas pump, and a cold spike of pure horror went straight through me.
“Oh, shit,” I breathed.
My Grindr profile had a face.My actual, recognizable, here's-the-investigative-journalist-face, the one I was so proud of, thetruth is the brand, theI don't hide behind a torso—and I'd walked into a building full of terrified closeted gay men and lit up their grid like a flare.
Every one of those messages was somebody clocking that there was exactly one real face in this entire anonymous city, and that face was mine.And like an idiot I was broadcasting it from the middle of their hiding place.
I killed the photo.Three taps, gone, profile blanked to a gray square like everybody else's, and my heart was racing like I'd sprinted up the twelve flights instead of riding the elevator.
Stupid.Rookie.Mistake.The kind of mistake that outs an undercover reporter before he's filed a single word.And then—because I am, at the bottom of everything, a curious animal—I opened the messages.
The first one stopped me cold.
No face, naturally.A torso.But the torso was—
Okay.I'm a professional.I look at things clinically.
The torso was obscene.Broad through the shoulders, narrow at the hip, a chest with actual hair on it instead of the waxed plastic everybody posts, abs that you could've done your taxes on, the whole thing lit warm and a little shadowed like he knew exactly what he was doing with a phone camera.And there, dead center, hanging on a thin gold chain in the valley between two flawless pecs: a tiny gold cross.
I laughed out loud.Of course.Here, of all the rooms in America.The cross winked at me in the warm light, this absurd, perfect little contradiction, faith and flesh on the same chain, and something in me—the journalist, the cynic, the lonely animal, I genuinely could not have told you which—leaned in.I tapped on his message.
hey
My thumbs moved before my better judgment could file an objection.
What's up?
The reply came back fast.Faster than a careful man should answer.
better now
