the unknown
by Douglas Messerli
Mark
Abramowitz (screenwriter, based on a story by Dan O’Connor, and director) Meet
Up / 2017 [26 minutes]
It’s a young gay man’s worst
nightmare, but it happens over and again, when he picks up a good-looking guy
to discover himself before the end of the evening in true danger. One imagines
that one learns through such experiences, if he survives, but gay men are easy
prey for those with hate and other agendas on their minds, and it happens—as it
has to me—more than once in a world that involves late hours, drugs,
risk-taking, and unquenched desire.
In this story the “prey” is a seemingly nice boy, the son of a judge,
Miles (Kevin Necciai) who has planned to spend the evening with a regular or
Grindr date, who doesn’t show up. As he waits at the bar, he’s cute enough to
even attract the attention of the bartender who appears ready to jump into bed
with him immediately if he’d let him.
As he readies to go home, a handsome young man approaches him for a
light—a time worn ruse, but successful nonetheless when you have the looks of
Tyler (Jordan Sangalang), who quickly establishes that he’s ready to share some
good weed with him if he’ll only drive him the local drive-in grocery for some
papers to roll, and then to the guy who keeps his stash, a man named Chris, who
he calls “Cash man.”
The late evening (it’s now 1:00) begins in true fashion when naturally
Chris isn’t home and they are met only by his understandably indignant mother,
who’s not about to let them in, as Tyler insists, to look around the place for
where her son has hidden his dope.
A shrewd individual would have already
perceived that there is a desperation about Tyler that suggests a deeper reason
for his search, namely that he’s into far more serious stuff. But it takes the
somewhat naïve Miles another late-night visit to what is clearly a serious dope
house, with a doped-up girl in charge who’s not about to hand over more dope to
Tyler when he already owes her more than $500.
We don’t quite know what happens in the
few moments that Tyler is alone again with the drug dealers, but we do see
blood being washed off his hands, and we can suspect there’s been a murder to
go with it, particularly since, when Miles finds him again, he has some much
stronger “stuff.”
Miles now recognizes it’s time to end
the farce, but it has already gone too far, and when Miles tries to finish off
the evening, rejecting the heroin or whatever drug Tyler now wants him to
share, Tyler goes “ballistic,” suggesting he “thinks he’s better” than him and
offering him his cock if only to pull Miles further into the vortex into which
he’s already spinning. But it is clearly now a client / customer relationship
of which Miles wants no part. And when he demands Tyler get out the car
immediately, it sets himself up for the tortures we (and he perhaps) feared
from the very begging: a knife at his throat, he himself being pulled from the
car, and a thorough beating, stopping, and kicking which as the dope kicks in
might easily have ended in his death if in one lucky moment Miles had not found
a large club of wood to knock his assailant to the ground and run off, pulling
away in the car as he is chased by Tyler, begging him to just be friends again.
Even for Miles there will never probably be such an unknown “friend” in
his life again, as his former date texts that he’s sorry he couldn’t make it
that night. It’s the kind of night that makes a gay man wonder if he ever wants
to meet up with unknown again; but then how to find someone given the
statistics for sex, let alone for possible love? These are, terrifyingly, the
rules of the game.
Los Angeles, September 20, 2022 | Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September
2022).
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