Christopher Stoddard
Art by Kevin Tobin
An excerpt from The Virtuous Ones by Christopher Stoddard
The Uber ride back to the hotel in Santa Monica after picking up drugs in downtown L.A. will take Brandon an estimated twenty minutes, but it already feels much longer. Darkness surrounds the car, save for intermittent streetlights along the highway and scattered lights in the windows of low-rise buildings that make up this sprawling, suburban metropolis. To stave off his impatient need to snort away the two hundred bucks in powdered form that’s burning a hole in his shorts, he logs on to Grindr, switching the zip code to the hotel’s, in search of men who are online and in the area.
A drunken group of happy hour victims are outside the main entrance to the hotel when he arrives. They’re smoking actual cigarettes in—gasp—L.A. Their heads rubberneck in his direction as he exits the car. The two girls are gaping shamelessly at him. Before he can escape inside, the shorter of the blond pair grabs him by the arm.
“Um, hi, so my girl over there thinks you’re super hot. Want to say hi?”
The other one lowers her head, her hand acting as a visor to hide her flushed cheeks. “Oh my god, Christine, stop!”
“What’s up bro,” one of the cookie cutter hot dudes interjects. “Want to have a cig with us?” He’s wearing a fitted black suit, sans tie or loosened collar.
If he were offering on his own behalf, the answer would be hell yes, but alas… “I’m good, thanks. Your friend is cute, but I’m not into girls,” Brandon discloses.
The failed, messy matchmaker drops back her bleached head, roaring at the clear night sky. “Fuck, of course!”
Brandon shrugs, a superficial apology for preferring dick. He rushes inside before having to suffer through more. Perhaps he’ll find the hot dude on Grindr later. “Straight, discreet, looking for now.”
Like The Flash, Brandon whizzes through the lobby into the first elevator car. He swipes his keycard and hits the button for the second floor. He taps the close button repeatedly as if he were sending an urgent telegram, praying to no one that the doors slide shut before someone else arrives. Shared elevators exacerbate his claustrophobia, especially when he’s in a rush to do drugs and find a dude to do him.
Kevin Tobin, Miasma [Projection], 2021-2022.
Oil, flashe, spray paint and wax on hollow core doors, 80 x 72 inches
This being his third visit to Santa Monica Proper Hotel, he’s familiar with the zigs and zags of the hallways and interconnected buildings, barely having to look up at the arrows and range of room numbers at every corner to find his room. The peepholes on the doors are just peepholes, but he knows after a few lines they’ll become evil eyes copping his every move, even when he’s on the other side of the one living in the door to his room. The eye will just do a one-eighty.
The first hour or so is a pleasure. The beginning of the high motivates Brandon to shower, moisturize, coif and conceal, and dress in his hookup uniform, a plain black T-shirt and gym shorts. Before opening the Grindr app on his iPhone, he answers a few demanding work emails that would’ve raised his anxiety if he was sober. He responds to the urgent requests from clients and co-workers in an obliging tone that borders on peppy, quite the antithesis to his trademark sass. They reply with emojis of praying hands and bright yellow hearts, pleasantly surprised by his sudden flexibility.
Phase two of his evening begins with two more lines, beer and vodka from the mini fridge, the initial signs of anxiety and paranoia seeping from his brain into his chest, and a tingling in his crotch. He quits all work applications on his laptop, opens Apple Music to play chill but upbeat tunes, specifically the album Honey by Robyn. He sets aside the laptop on the other side of the king-sized bed and commences the search on his phone for more strangers. Just as he opens Grindr, a banner notification appears. His boyfriend is texting, likely to say that he’s having trouble sleeping without him in bed. Brandon will struggle to sleep tonight, too, but for very different reasons. He thumbs his boyfriend away, mildly annoyed at the inadvertent cock-block, making a mental note to tell him tomorrow that he was already sleeping when he messaged him. “Long day.”
Brandon’s profile pic on Grindr is from his shirtless torso collection of a couple years ago, when he was single and a few pounds lighter. The tattoos on his arms are visible, which would be a no-no if he were in New York, but he’s not. He’s thousands of miles away, where he isn’t at risk of being recognized by anyone who may know his boyfriend. He’s pretty sure they agreed to a don’t-ask-don’t-tell open relationship when they were drunk and high one night last year. He boldly advertises he’s looking to suck straight or masculine bi cock. He selects “discreet” as his “tribe” and filters his search to white tops only.
He isn’t racist or anything like that; he just isn’t attracted to men of color. His preferences may stem from the subconscious racism that comes with being white in America, he realizes, but he doesn’t believe it’s his fault. He doesn’t understand why he should force himself to fuck people he doesn’t want just to be politically correct. No one needs to know about the various white boys he enlists to dick him down on whatever night.
Kevin Tobin, Head of a Bat, 2022. Oil on panel, 16 x 16 inches
The clock on the nightstand reads after midnight. Brandon rinses his hands, sops up the blood on the back of his head with two white hand towels, staining them crimson. He tosses them in the trash, covering them with a ball of toilet paper. With a desperate urge to get out of the room, he exits without looking in the mirror to see the bloody, torn black T-shirt, the semen stains on his shorts hardening and turning white.
He’s just walking. He’s walking and humming “Nights” by Frank Ocean and just strolling down the hall without a care in the world. Adrenaline has replaced his craving for more coke. He’s higher than ever.
In the elevator, a lesbian couple holding hands, both with long braids and matching white and camel-colored linen outfits, stand aghast at his appearance, but he doesn’t notice. He’s just riding the elevator, minding his own business. They ask him if he’s okay, but their concerned voices fall on deaf ears. “Nights” is blaring from the speakers in his brain.
The doors open and he walks out slowly. The couple rushes past him to get help from the front desk. He exits enveloped in Frank’s singing voice, consumed by the intensifying natural high. But then he collapses, and as his face meets the hard lobby floor, he feels absolutely nothing.
He wipes the coke crumbs off the bathroom sink with the palm of his hand and licks them clean. He collects the empty beer cans and tiny vodka bottles, placing them neatly on top of the mini fridge. In front of the wardrobe, he piles high the clothes that were strewn about the room. He dims the lights and flips Robyn over to Frank Ocean, lowering the volume so it’s less of a soundtrack for the forthcoming sex and more just background noise to fill the uncomfortable silence of strangers meeting and fucking. One of his pet peeves is when his bobbing head syncs with the bass of the music.
Cocaine comes back to mind. He can use one more line before sex. Dropping to his knees at the bathroom entrance, he sticks his finger in the space between the corner of the doorframe and the marble threshold where he dropped the coke. Digging around inside, he realizes the hole is much deeper than he thought. His finger barely grazes the tip of the plastic baggie of powdered salvation. He’s pushed it deeper into the hole, so it’s now well under the threshold and out of reach. His heart is speeding to the point of reckless endangerment.
“Fuck fuck fuck!” He must hurry. The guy will be here soon.
Rummaging through a toiletry bag, he finds his tweezers and shoves them in the hole in the hopes of getting a grip on the baggie, but to no avail. When he pulls out his finger, it’s bloody from scraping it against a nail in the floor. The tweezers are bent out of shape and permanently unusable. He chucks them across the room and resorts to pulling up the carpet that borders the marble threshold, revealing an unfinished wood platform. From there he’s able to grip the threshold with his clammy hands and pull with all his might. The Equinox classes that his bestie is always dragging him to have paid off. The marble breaks into two pieces, one of them cutting his palm. The force of the release propels him backward, causing him to hit his head on the edge of the bed frame. Dazed and determined, he thrusts himself back up to his knees. He scans the wreckage for his Precious, and there it is, covered in blood. Luckily, the baggie was shut tightly, so the blow hasn’t been contaminated.
After rinsing his hands, which refuse to stop bleeding, he uses a hand towel to block the blood flow and awards himself with a fat rail of coke. He gets back on his knees to piece the bloody marble threshold back together like a gruesome puzzle. He wipes it down and smooths the carpet back in place as best he can. At first glance, the destruction isn’t noticeable, so he should be able to get away with it. By the time the hotel staff, or perhaps the next guest, discovers it, it’ll be impossible to determine who did it. It could’ve been anyone who used this room previously or will in the future.
By the time the front desk calls, informing him of his guest’s arrival, he’s a sweaty mess again. The last soaked T-shirt, chilled by the air conditioning on full blast, is a lovely cooling agent for his overheated brow. He darts into the bathroom for one last beauty check in the mirror, and notices he needs a little more concealer to hide his puffy eyes and darkening circles. The guy knocks on the door as he’s blending in the makeup with the tip of a shaky digit.
“Deep breath,” he tells his reflection. The well-practiced smile that lifts his features and a few years of age comes into view. The Botox he had injected about a week and a half ago is in full effect, so his crow’s feet are nowhere to be found. He’s ready for what’s behind door number-one.
“Okay, Brandon. Let’s do this.”
Kevin Tobin, Gain of Function, 2022.
Oil, flashe, spray paint and wax on hollow core door, 80 x 36 inches
The sweet sound of Frank Ocean singing “Chanel” wakes Brandon from his violently induced slumber. His hand and the back of his head are throbbing. The delayed pain has arrived, causing him to wince audibly. The water is running in the bathroom sink, the air in the room cold against his freezing, vibrating skin. His heart is pounding, and he’s wet with sweat and blood. The night comes back to him like the scent of a memory. Pulling himself up by the end of the mattress, he struggles to stand fully because his shorts and boxer briefs are constricting his ankles. He remembers what happened and starts to cry.
The track flips to “Nights,” the lyrics apropos of his cruel, secretive encounter with the stranger. The difference between the story in the song and what’s happened in real life is that Frank’s reluctant tryst was ultimately consensual. With the stranger, it turned into anything but; after Brandon tried rejecting him at the door because the guy looked nothing like his picture, he forced himself inside. Brandon rolls over in tears, the condom protruding from his anus lightly slapping his inner thigh. He flinches at the stinging sensation as he pulls it out, noticing it’s ripped.
He casts back to the time he blew the quarterback in high school in someone’s basement during a house party. The next day Brandon told everybody, so he wasn’t shocked when the football player and his teammates jumped him in retaliation for spreading the “lie.” Brandon took the beating in silence. Having hid his effeminacy as best he could when he was a kid, he rarely received a sideways look, let alone a classmate calling him a fag. He’d always wondered what it was like being gay-bashed, but he never thought it’d be instigated by his own actions. It’s no wonder he’s lying on the floor, soaking up the carpet with his blood and tears, blaming himself for the attack. He should’ve known better.
He considers calling 911 but decides against it. There are drugs somewhere in the room, unless the stranger took the baggie. Bottles are everywhere. The floor near the bathroom is in shreds. What’s more, this is a business trip, and his employer would surely fire him for this. He’s not positive the stranger raped him, anyway. He could’ve been obliging after the guy chucked him onto the bed. But then a flashback of the sock in his mouth, his wrists cuffed with the stranger’s large hand. Faggot this and faggot that. “If you say something to anyone, I will fucking kill you.” The common line in movies and TV shows that depict rape and sexual assault proved to be accurate.
The clock on the nightstand reads after midnight. Brandon rinses his hands, sops up the blood on the back of his head with two white hand towels, staining them crimson. He tosses them in the trash, covering them with a ball of toilet paper. With a desperate urge to get out of the room, he exits without looking in the mirror to see the bloody, torn black T-shirt, the semen stains on his shorts hardening and turning white.
He’s just walking. He’s walking and humming “Nights” by Frank Ocean and just strolling down the hall without a care in the world. Adrenaline has replaced his craving for more coke. He’s higher than ever.
In the elevator, a lesbian couple holding hands, both with long braids and matching white and camel-colored linen outfits, stand aghast at his appearance, but he doesn’t notice. He’s just riding the elevator, minding his own business. They ask him if he’s okay, but their concerned voices fall on deaf ears. “Nights” is blaring from the speakers in his brain.
The doors open and he walks out slowly. The couple rushes past him to get help from the front desk. He exits enveloped in Frank’s singing voice, consumed by the intensifying natural high. But then he collapses, and as his face meets the hard lobby floor, he feels absolutely nothing.
Christopher Stoddard
Christopher Stoddard is the author of four novels and the founder of Itna Press. His most recent book, At Night Only, was praised by Kirkus Reviews and PEN award-winning author Edmund White, and was a staff pick in The Paris Review. For more than a decade, he worked at various ad agencies in New York City. He lives in Los Angeles.
Kevin Tobin
Kevin Tobin's (b.1989, London, Ontario) lurid paintings explore primal aspects of the body as an inherently amoral, animalistic machine optimized for pleasure and violence. Tobin frequently uses the image of a bat as an ambiguously benevolent or malevolent sentient force. He often utilizes medical photography and painterly abstraction to collapse interior and exterior anatomies, and circumvent the didactic politics of identity in the service of making figurative painting mysterious again. His exhibitions include Lubov, NY (solo); Salon 94, NY; The Pit, LA; Fragment Gallery, Moscow; and 68 Projects, Berlin. Tobin lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.