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Peerson thing and figure out who had burgled me. I wasn’t exactly sure where junkies hung out in my neighborhood, but I figured if I just walked west four or five blocks I’d probably find some low-life bars. I could go in and spread the word that I was interested in buying my stuff back. It was a long shot, but it might turn something up.
    Technically, it was my day off, and I shouldn’t feel bad spending it sorting out my B&E. Still, Sunday was the perfect day to spend running around the bars showing Brian Peerson’s picture to every queer in the city. I was debating what to do when Burt came into the living room.
    “You wanna come look at this?” I wondered if I’d been wrong about him. It was the kind of line that would start a sex scene in a porno. But, when I followed him out to the kitchen, he walked out my back door and led me back to the alley behind the building.
    “I was throwing away some wood scraps when I saw that.” He pointed halfway down the alley.
    Next to a garbage can was a smashed turntable that looked suspiciously like mine. I hurried down the alley. Yeah, it was my turntable. And in the trash can next to it I found my clock radio and my toaster. The receiver wasn’t there. Either the burglar decided to keep it, or someone else had picked it up during the night.
    “That your stuff?” Burt asked.
    “Yup.” I looked around in a couple more garbage cans and found a shirt and a couple of my albums. The whole thing was beginning to feel more like vandalism than burglary. I had to be honest with myself. In the past couple years I’d run a lot of guys through my bedroom, then asked them to leave without much ceremony. Sometimes the minute we were finished, sometimes the next morning, but they were always asked to leave.
    Most didn’t mind much, but some were obviously disappointed that I hadn’t turned out to be their savior swooping in to rescue them from their shitty childhoods, their mundane jobs in retail, Boystown - 20

    their narrow lives of cigarettes and booze and catty comments. I guess it wasn’t too hard to imagine one of them stopping back and taking a stab at making me as unhappy as they were.
    Since there never seemed to be a lot of time to get phone numbers between the fucking phase and the please-leave phase, I couldn’t exactly call around and find out who I might have pissed off.
    Which wouldn’t be a big deal; I’d just write it off to experience. But this trick with a grudge had stolen my spare gun. That was troubling.
    I took my few things and walked back to my apartment. Burt was pretty much finished. A large metal plate now surrounded the deadbolt on my back door. He told me he’d send a bill to the management company and I shouldn’t worry about it. When I tried to give him a five, he turned it down. “Keep it. You’ve had a shitty day.”
    After Burt left, I had to decide what to do with the rest of my Sunday. I’d reached a dead end on the burglary and didn’t expect to come up with any way to nail down whoever did it. At the same time, I was too rattled by it to focus on the Peerson case. I checked the schedule for the Parkway that sat on top of an unread edition of The Reader . They were playing All About Eve and A Shot in the Dark . It seemed an odd double feature until I remembered that George Sanders was in both of them. I didn’t think I had the patience to sit in the dark for four hours, or even two. I could go to the Y, work out some aggression, stop at the bookstore and buy the latest Blueboy, then spend the evening jacking off. If I wanted to be productive I could try digging my car out. The ’74
    Duster had been sitting over on Newport through two snowstorms. If I needed it in a hurry, I’d be in trouble.
    In the end, I decided to take a little of Walt Paddington’s advance money and go buy a decent boom box. I wandered down Broadway until I found an electronics store whose window was all about Beta-Max VCRs and Video Cameras. Peeking through