I have five seconds left.
“I never wanted a brother!” I shout at the screen, unsticking my palms from it with a crackling noise, the image on the screen flashing on and off, then rippling. “I never wanted a brother!” I scream again, tears flowing from the yellow edges of my vision and running into my mouth where they taste like gutted insects.
Pulling my pants up, I shout once more at the screen, and Sammy, on the hook, looks me dead in the eyes and says, “Luke, you sad sack of shit. You never had a brother,” and I blunder out of the booth through the thick red curtains into the darkened hallway, still zipping up my fly and adjusting my belt.
Time’s up.
PART II
Overhead, dim fluorescent lighting flickers. And then I realize: silence. Absolute silence. No moans, no groans, no skin sticking to grimy vinyl, and no sounds of machines choking on money.
A gust corkscrews through the narrow hallway, ghosting the curtains covering each booth, and the hallway lengthens, grows for miles as the gust washes down it.
In that endless corridor, I steady myself, placing a hand against the black wall with my feet suctioned to the tacky concrete floor, also painted black. The booths are all made from cheap plywood and painted black, badly. The dark red curtains offer the only color in the wavering fluorescent light.
“Syd?” I yell. Then, less assuredly, “Um, Derrick?”
A small thump and groan and the curtains to a booth sixty feet away billow just a bit.
“Sammy?” I say, walking toward the stall with one hand still on the wall, feeling the room askew, slightly tilted, and afraid to lose my balance.
At the booth I hear a whisper ejaculate my name and the curtains once again flutter.
“Sammy?” I ask again and slowly part the curtains, revealing a small room, slightly bigger than the booth I was in with Syd. There’s a large, square window at the back. Red velvet curtains on the opposite side of the glass block any view. A standing lamp stands in the corner. In front of the window is a chair and a parking meter with instructions: FIFTEEN SECONDS FOR A QUARTER.
The warmth from the drug a little earlier starts to liquefy my limbs again and I realize I need a seat, so I sit and dig my fingers into my change-pocket and pull out a quarter, which I quickly deposit into the meter, twisting the lever.
TICK-TICK-TICK!
The deafening sound of clock hands flood the room, forcing me to cover my ears, and the curtain splits at the middle and recedes, revealing a blurry couple on a heart-shaped bed banging away, doggy-style. They’re only a few feet behind the glass when I realize who the couple is.
TICK-TICK-TICK!
“Mom? Dad?” I say, my eyes clearing up from the drugs and earlier tears and present confusion. Just as I say it, however, the curtains close. I know I shouldn’t but I have to know what the fuck’s going on so I push another quarter into the meter and sure enough it’s my mom and dad going to town on each. Dad’s bald, his head shaved and glittery with sweat. His beer belly’s swishing this way and that. Sweat drips from his grey goatee. Mom’s beneath him, her hair a nasty tangle of spider webs and her floppy breasts flinging this way and that. She keeps slapping dad really fucking hard like she’s trying to truly hurt him and dad laughs and, as I stand and back away from the window, I stumble over the chair that I just knocked over.
“Hey, Lukey! Luke, son! Get back here, boy!” I hear my dad yell, but I’m trying to get the fuck out of there, unwilling to believe my eyes, but not really fearing for my sanity as I know I’m on something. I just don’t know what.
But, when I get to where the exit curtains should have been, I hit a door, and it’s locked. I slam into the door, both my mom and dad yelling my name and laughing and giggling like shitfaced teenagers, laughing so hard they’re covering their mouths while still going at the deed.
TICK-TICK-TICK!
The door won’t give, however, and I turn back to the window and notice the parking meter there has new instructions: ONE QUARTER TO CLOSE CURTAINS—FIFTEEN SECONDS.
I don’t even have to think about it. Before I know it I’m at the meter with a handful of quarters, feeding the meter as fast as I can, but the curtain keeps closing and opening, proving I’m not feeding it fast enough, that someone has apparently pressed the remote control button on me: SLOW MOTION.
“What’s the matter, Lukey?” my mom’s saying, now on top of dad, the two of them a mass of loose and floppy and sweaty flesh. “We’re making you a new brother!”
The curtain closes.
The curtain opens.
The curtain closes.
The curtain opens. Mom’s on her back on the bed, her belly suddenly huge and stretched, and dad’s standing at the foot of the bed, clapping his hands, hopping, and hooting. “Come on, boy! Come on, Sammy, you can do it! Crawl right out of that cunt, now, you squirmy little shit!” he yells and mom’s screaming away, her head snapping left and right, spit and perspiration flying from her face. And before the curtain closes, dad’s shoving a hand up mom, blood pulsing out onto the white sheets of the heart-shaped bed. “Alright, then, if you’re not coming out, I’m coming to get you,” dad yells.
Fast as I can, I shovel quarters into the meter, but my efforts prove pointless and the curtain keeps slipping back and revealing more blood and wild faces and both my mom and dad screaming and yelling and grinding their teeth. Finally the curtain opens and stays open and there’s my mom, seemingly unconscious, the room covered completely in a viscous red, and dad’s between her legs with what looks like a bone saw, carving into her.
I put a hand to my mouth, but not quickly enough, and the vomit squirts between my fingers and sprays the glass with flecks.
“Don’t worry, Lukey, we’re getting you a new brother. Don’t you worry, we’ll get your brother back,” and I hear the cracking and splitting and a gushing sound and I close my eyes and when I open them dad is pressed up against the glass, covered in blood and mucus, yelling, suddenly soundless, but, in his right hand he holds a tiny, naked, three-armed, two-legged figure by the ankle. Dad’s breathing hard against the glass, his breath fogging it. He’s mouthing the words “I’m sorry” over and over again and lights are flicking on and off and I now realize the glass is not fogging before the tiny figure’s quiet mouth as it is in front of my dad’s.
Without thinking, I back away from the monstrosity at the window and fall back through the curtains, back out into the hallway, finally.
The lights out here go in and out. Black walls and floor. Curtains the color of browning blood. All still and quiet but for the sound of my shoe-soles getting sucked off by the soiled concrete floor. I wipe the vomit from my hands onto my jeans and hold back another gut-convulsion.
“Syd! Syd, goddammit!” I yell almost ripping out my eyeballs with spastic fingers. “Where the fuck did you go? Why did you leave me?”
It occurs to me then that the drugs couldn’t have come from Syd. Why would she waste drugs on me? Wilson must have given them to her to give to me, along with the forty bucks he gave her to blow me. And it was Wilson’s idea to come here, when all I wanted was to have a few drinks with friends. But then it turned into, “No more of this shit, I’m taking my lonely friend here to get his real birthday present!” and when the rest found out we were going to Tassels ‘N’ Tipples in North Beach—a place notorious for nefarious acts that often end in one going to the hospital for either a busted bone or a mysterious infection in the nether regions—they all decided to go their separate ways.
Wiping tears from my eyes and snot from my nose, I discover a black door in the black wall opposite the infinite row of black booths. I hear crying. I stand still. It takes me a while to realize it’s not me who’s crying and finally I open the door. It’s a dark room filled with little vanity tables speckled in powders and spilt nail polishes, obviously the girls’ dressing room. The whole space hangs heavy with a perfumed cloud that smells of cotton candy and sweat. At a table in the back of the room, a woman sobs, her he
ad buried in her arms on the table. She wears a black silk robe. A few steps closer and I realize it’s Syd.
“Syd? Syd, goddammit. I’ve been looking for you. Where’d you go? What the hell did you give me?” I ask, approaching her cautiously, though I don’t know why, watching myself in her vanity mirror creeping closer and closer until my hand’s on her heaving shoulder. She looks up and meets my eyes in the mirror. Her reading glasses are off and her black mascara has run. There’s a small pile of photos on the table showing a little girl in a tire swing in front of a small suburban home, a yellow Mazda from the late eighties parked in the driveway. There’s another of that little girl peeking over a crib at a baby surrounded by clown dolls. Another shows the family of four seated on the couch together, smiling, the father looking lovingly at the mother who stares directly into the camera lens trying not to collapse into a giggle-fit. The photo in Syd’s left hand, however, is of herself as an adult standing before a large oval mirror, naked and hugging her own stretched, pregnant belly, a smile softening the corners of her lips. In that oval mirror you can see the photographer of the picture, but the flash and blur of the setting turned him into an apparition.
Her eyes like glassy marbles, Syd looks down at that picture then meets my eyes again in the mirror and says, “I only ever wanted a family, Luke. That’s all I ever wanted,” and more black tears trickle down her stained porcelain face. I notice that her fallen tears are dissolving the figures on the photos laid out before her, erasing the moments captured until all that’s left are squares of blank paper.
“Me, too, Syd,” I tell her, meaning it with every fiber of my being. “My parents, though, they—”
A flash and blur explodes in the mirror over my right shoulder but when I turn around there’s no one there, just the open door I came through swinging gently with a draft that gives me chills. When I turn back to Syd, she’s no longer there, sitting at the vanity table. But she’s still staring up at me with wet eyes from within the mirror, not moving, only staring and blinking and staring, her mouth slightly open as if frozen in the moment before saying something.
“Syd?” I ask and touch the mirror, but she doesn’t react, just continues to stare and blink. As cautiously as I approached her, I now back away from her reflection caught on loop in that mirror until I’m back in the eternal corridor of tainted stalls with their rustling curtains.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, there you are,” a tall, thin man standing in front of a booth twenty feet away says. He wears blue-green surgical scrubs, including gloves and the mask over his mouth. He holds the curtains to the booth open with one hand and waves me toward him with the other. “Come on now, dammit, we haven’t got all day now, do we? You were scheduled to go under eight minutes ago and we’re running so very very behind. This has to be done—this all has to be done in a timely, precise manner. We’re ready for you, we’re all ready for you—cleaned and scrubbed and prepped. Now get over here and quit wasting our time. You’re not our only patient, you know that don’t you?” he asks, straining to keep some sense of patience in his tone.
Standing next to him, he puts an arm around my shoulder and guides me into the booth, which is a bare operating room. There’s a sterile metal table in the middle of the room under a large lamp and there’s a modest team of surgeons and nurses standing there fidgeting with metal utensils or arranging tools on metal tables.
Despite it all, there’s something very natural and comforting about this room, about this whole scene. I smile at the people who can’t smile back because their faces are hidden and I glide to the metal table and slide onto it and stare up into the big burning lamp above me. I feel all warm and gooey again and it feels like love as the first scalpel incision carves into the left half of my torso. The surgeon works above me, cooing as if to a baby or kitten. Metal instruments come and go and get thrown into a clinking bucket out of view. It feels so good. It feels so right. I want to reach up and pet the surgeon or take one of the nurses by the hand and give it a good squeeze. Blood and pus and grey fluids leak out of me and it feels so relieving to have the pressure finally escape. Except, someone’s screaming. Someone’s screaming their fucking head off, wailing like a child that just got flipped over the handlebars of his little BMX and took a nosedive into the asphalt. Confused and scared now, I look up at the surgeon who just keeps carving away at me. I reach for the nurses but they pull away. I put my hand on the surgeon’s shoulder and he shrugs it off, more determined now at the carving, going faster and faster and faster. The screaming gets louder and louder and all my muscles tense up and this all seems so familiar again, but not natural, and not good. Then I realize the screaming is coming from nearby, very near, and it just keeps going, wailing and wailing at higher pitches. I can barely manage, but finally do turn my head down and to the left to where the surgeon cuts and there’s this mangled, bird-like creature there on the table, attached to my left side by ribbons of flesh but peeling away in a glistening redness of splitting meat and gristle. Its eyes are wild and pleading and its three arms are flailing, gripping at my torso, trying to pull itself back to my side but unable to get a grip with all the blood covering us both.
It screams and screams and screams and I say, “Sammy, just let go. Just let go, little pigeon. Just let go, little brother.” But he doesn’t, even when the final swing of the scalpel removes him completely from my body. He just keeps swiping at me with all his tiny limbs, reaching for me until finally he slips and slides from the table like so much afterbirth, screaming for me, calling my name.
Though the surgeon tries to hold me back against the table, I jump from it and push everyone away and, naked and bleeding, back away from them toward the curtains, all of them with their hands out trying to calm me and convince me to return to the table because they need to finish the job. They block access to my clothes, which are behind them near the red-slickened metal table, but I spot my tidy whities at my feet and grab them, as well as a small towel I find folded up and stacked in a metal bowl. I step into my underwear, pull them up, and push the towel hard against the gaping wound in my side, which makes the nearly forgotten puncture mark in my thigh look like nothing.
Then I’m falling through the curtains but I don’t wind up back in the hallway. Instead, I’m in an Oregon highway rest stop bathroom that I recognize for some reason, and I’m facing the mirror, and in the mirror is my twelve-year-old self and I’m crying and there’s a thunderous knocking at the door that rattles the doorframe and I don’t want to open it but I’m compelled to. My uncle’s large figure storms in and he asks if I’m having trouble again “tinkling” and I tell him I’m not and that I never have trouble and that I’m too old for the word “tinkling.” But he’s impatient and he pulls me over to the urinal by the waist of my jeans and tells me to hurry but I just stare at him and tell him I can’t go with someone watching and he says “nonsense” while unbuckling my belt and unzipping my jeans and pulling my penis out and holding it, telling me to go, to just pee, goddammit, and he’s holding onto it tight, and I push him away, screaming and bawling and sprint for the door.
And again I’ve not found my way back to the hallway. I’m now in the garage of my childhood home, the dirty afternoon sunlight sifting in through the smoked windows of the garage door. My heart pounds and I’m still scared and bleeding and only in my underwear but I am overwhelmed with the need to hide so I slip under a tarp in the corner, unconcerned about the black widows I remember nesting there. It doesn’t take long before I fall asleep. I wake to my parents standing over me and I’m small again, maybe five-years-old, and they’re shaking their heads, mildly amused but mostly pissed off and they tell me I can’t keep running off any time I feel like it and I tell them I was just playing with my friend, which sets a fire in my father’s eyes and he yanks me by the arm to my feet and spanks me hard and tells me he doesn’t want to hear another fucking thing about my imaginary friend and do I hear him and, while crying and biting my little knuckles, trying to stifle m
y sobs and fear, I tell him I do. My mother picks me up and carries me out of the garage.
Which sends me tumbling into the wooded park on the outskirts of my childhood neighborhood and there’s a shallow hole in the earth there near a large oak and there’s a finger poking through at the bottom of the hole and I can’t tell if it’s human, animal, or stuffed animal, and before I can decide what to do I’m on all fours pushing mounds of dirt into the hole with hands and forearms until it’s filled. Then I pat the earth flat and find some nearby fallen leaves and twigs and scatter them over it. I just sit there by the filled hole in the wooded park until dusk when suddenly beams of light swing in between the trees as people in badged uniforms and my neighbors and parents march through the woods calling for “little Lukey” and asking that I please come out and show myself. I can’t, however, so I run out of the woods.
And into the hallway, which smells of old sex and baby powder.
Enjoy Me Page 6