Behind her cash register, Debbie kept a list labeled "No Checks", which contained the names of everyone who'd bounced a check at the diner. As Brian watched his trick walk around his living room in circles, he decided that he'd need a similar list, just to make sure he never invited this guy home again.

The guy leaned so close to one of the framed pieces on the wall that his nose smudged the glass. "I can't believe you have a sketch from Rage one. It must've cost a fortune."

Brian ignored him and walked into the kitchen. When he returned, the trick was still talking, staring at another picture on the wall and gesturing so wildly with his hands that Brian thought he might fly away.

"This is amazing," the trick gasped. "It looks like the variant cover of Rage 29, but the background's completely different. Is this an early sketch?" He looked over at Brian with his eyes wide. "Do you know Justin Taylor?"

Brian sprayed some Windex on the picture, spraying his trick in the process. "Stop breathing on my shit," he said. He wiped off the glass.

"I'm a huge Rage fan," the guy said. "I have every issue."

Brian set the Windex down on his coffee table and picked up a small notepad he used to make shopping lists. "What's your name?" he asked.

The trick blinked. "I told you at the club. I'm Gerard."

"Gerard," Brian said as he wrote it on the pad. Above it he wrote "No Dick".

Gerard seemed unconcerned about being blacklisted. He turned back to the sketch. "The best part of the Evil City plotline was the ending," he said. "When J.T. realized that he needed both the Evil City and Rage's magic semen to reach his full superhero potential, it was so perfect." He smiled. "And when J.T. moved half his weapons from his city apartment into Rage's closet, oh my god, I cried."

Brian went to the kitchen to pour himself a drink. The guy had seemed so promising. He was hot, all porcelain skin and eyelashes, with painted-on black jeans, a perfect ass, pretty but not so young that Brian would feel like a dirty old man. He was also refreshingly sober in a crowd where the methheads easily outnumbered everyone else. But when Brian got him home he discovered two troubling facts: that the smell he'd thought was a homeless guy in the alley was actually the smell of Gerard, and that Gerard did not shut up.

"Listen up, Bernard," Brian said as he walked into the living room and drained the rest of his scotch.

"...kind of a spec script," Gerard was saying, "Though I guess you could call it fanfiction. Anyway, in it I have Zephyr getting bitten by a radioactive squid, and then -"

Brian walked up to him and covered his mouth with his hand. "Apparently you have a problem with shutting up, and I have a problem with smelling you. But there's a solution. Take off your clothes, get in my shower, and put my dick in your mouth. Everyone wins." Brian took his hand off Gerard's mouth.

"And then he grows giant tentacles -"

Brian put his hand over Gerard's mouth again, and used his other hand to drag him to the bathroom.