“What the duck, man?”
“Ow, you’re hurting my elbow,” Lron said. Viral had grabbed his college roommate shortly after Tyler, their host, had gone into his kitchenette to wipe down his vintage bong with isopropyl alcohol. They stood in the bathroom of Tyler’s loft with the door shut behind them.
“You brought us to a drug-dealing pornographer’s house?” Viral asked.
“Hey, you tagged along with me,” Lron said. “TyTy’s like family. If his kind of people don’t meet your standards then you can k-k-k-k-kick off, Ziggy Stardust.”
Viral had only met Lron seven months ago when their college had randomly assigned them to live together as roommates. While Viral’s chosen major was computer science, Lron’s was something esoteric like inter-contextual gender theory, which Viral had only recently learned was the new name for the college's Film Department. All these months of cohabitation later, Viral still didn’t understand all of Lron’s cultural references. But he could tell when his roommate’s feelings had been hurt.
“Ok, ok. I’m sorry,” Viral said. “It’s just that...how do you know him, anyway?”
“Long story but suffice it to say we met on Grindr and things didn’t work out so we became platonic friends instead.”
Viral was still learning about the world outside his suburban bubble, but he knew enough to know that a friend of Lron’s was a friend of his. Viral scratched at the patch of dry skin at the back of his head. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be judgemental like that,” he said.
“It’s okay, bebe,” Lron said, checking his elbow in the mirror above the sink for any redness. “You’re from Oklahoma.”
“Illinois.”
“I’m sure anything other than the nuclear family unit gives you hives.”
Viral caught himself scratching at his head and pulled his arm down to his side. “Well, see, it’s not that I’m, like, uncomfortable with your and Tyler’s, um, the way you know each other --”...
“Carnally?”
“What? No, I wasn’t going to say that. It’s just…” Viral looked toward the ceiling searching for the right words to express the new heights of confusion he’d begun to encounter at a private liberal arts college in New England. Meanwhile, Lron had opened Tyler’s medicine cabinet and was applying a benzo cream to the elbow Viral had pinched.
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Viral continued: “It’s just that, like, Tyler has enough marijuana in there to stuff a throw pillow, and he makes a living scamming perverts.”
“No he doesn’t.”
“No, I’m sorry. Not perverts. Um, sexually unorthodox -”...
“Stop. No. First, you’re not ready to wrap your head around the fluidity of nouveau thermidorian sexual politics. Second, TyTy doesn’t make his ‘living’, as you call it, from consructed cam girls. He’s an Osterhauf.”
Lron stopped talking as if Viral was supposed to understand the implication of Tyler’s lineage. When Viral’s face reflected nothing but Oklahoman naivete, Lron explained. “His grandma, or granddad, or whatever, licensed the toolchain that led to Oxycontin.”
“So he’s ilke a billionaire?”
“At least. But, I mean, I don’t know how much of that is liquid so technically maybe like a hundred millionaire?”
Viral felt his chest relax. He wasn’t proud to admit that his perception of a drug-dealing smut-peddling heir to a blood money empire changed so quickly when he learned Tyler was part of the One Percent. But he couldn’t help it; it mattered. Suddenly, he felt safer. After all, what better place to be during a global pandemic than in the unassuming, faux-derelict loft of a morally dubious man with connections to the most powerful pharmaceutical companies in the world? And maybe, just maybe, if the virus his dad had contracted turned out to be the one killing all those people internationally then Tyler and his Osterhauf name could get a bead on some kind of vaccine. Viral couldn’t think of a better situation to be trapped in.
He felt warmth for Lron’s companionship and just a tiny amount of shame for his provincial moral worldview that equated safety with respectability. He’d just spent so long learning the ropes of what he thought was the right way to act while climbing the ladder toward the American Dream, and barely one year into his college career everything he’d come to know as fact had been turned inward like the used condom he found in the dorm bathroom in October. It was antithetical to everything his immigrant parents had taught him about America: maybe there really was safety in trust and expecting the best from strangers.
A banging on the door. “Hey, you guys about done in there?”
“Yeah, we’re coming out,” Lron shouted.
“Kewl,” Tyler said through the wall, “‘Cause I want to show you this thing I threw together that’s blowing up.”
Lron opened the door, and Viral saw that Tyler had put on a chef’s hat and was waving a greasy spatula in his hand.
“Or should I say: gone viral,” Tyler said and winked at Viral. “I hope you like Tulsi Gabbard.”
Viral felt his stomach drop to the bottom of his pelvis. Maybe his suburban, Northwest Illinois-framed instincts about the pot-pushing, artificial porn developer had been right all along.