I end up with a crumpled twenty-dollar bill. Don’t ask. Luckily, I don’t have to spend it on a cab, since the 19 Polk appears out of nowhere to rescue me. I’m home just as the clock moves from 2 a.m. to 2:01. Then it’s 4 a.m. and just when I’ve convinced myself that I was imagining the rats in my walls—it was really just the pigeons in the ceiling—I hear something gnawing. There’s no way that’s a pigeon. It sounds huge, like one of those cat-sized rats, just on the other side of my flimsy kitchen cabinets. The bottom cabinets are rotting away, and they don’t even shut—I’m afraid the rat is going to swallow my kitchen whole, that means me too—help!
The next day, it’s sunny and I actually get outside for a little bit of it, since I have to get to the chiropractor by 4. Later, it’s the first night in months when I have two tricks. First it’s the Palomar, leopard pattern carpet and clouds painted on the ceiling. These clouds look better than the ones in my lobby. The trick tells me I won’t smell the poppers while I fuck him, because he’ll hold them close to his nose. Right. The next trick is the story; he’s got the mirror and the razor blade out on the table.
His bed is so comfortable, I don’t know how he ever gets out of it—and I tell him that, which he thinks is funny. He wants to cuddle, at first it feels forced but I relax into it once I’m giving him a soft massage and he’s grabbing my thighs. When he sucks my dick, I make him do it slowly. Every time he moves his hands, I put them back where they belong: one hand under my balls, the other above my dick. Softly on the balls, really softly. I’m holding off, letting the tension build inside me until it almost isn’t there anymore, and then building it back up again. When I come, it’s so intense that I can’t possibly open my eyes.
Well, okay—it’s possible. I look out the window and into the next room, I close my eyes. He says how are you doing? I open my eyes, stare at the chandelier on the red ceiling while I lie there next to the trick and he lets me. The chandelier is in three layers, but it’s kind of simple too, and the music is a cheesy circuit mix but then the vocals fade out and the music is just those minimal beats that I live for. I’m staring at the chandelier and breathing, wondering if somehow I got some coke through the trick’s mouth. If the coke is this good, I’ll never be able to stop.
I just keep staring at the chandelier and the ceiling, squinting my eyes so that light pinpoints me and I’m wondering, really wondering how I got so high. Everything is here, in this bed—in that chandelier hanging from that ceiling. Everything. Then there’s a horn in the ceiling, in the music, just a tiny imitation car horn, honking over and over with the bells ringing and the beat, of course the beat and then everything drops out. I’m waiting for what’s next.
SHARKS
A blonde woman who looks like she could be on Sex in the City answers the door. I’m always worried I’ll ring the wrong doorbell, but this woman doesn’t seem confused, she even asks if I’m Tyler. I go inside.
The trick’s on the sofa and the woman’s name is Amber, she’s the trick’s daughter. Her boyfriend broke up with her tonight and then she started drinking belly-button shots off other guys, he told her she was a slut and now she’s ready to go to the strip clubs with the guys she met, they’re already there but she’s going to meet them. She tells me: if you went both ways, then I’d be interested.
The trick’s daughter leaves and we go into her brother’s room. The trick says: she’s not really my daughter. I’m not sure what that means exactly but the room is huge. The trick tells me he wants to please me, loves that I’m ticklish, smells like brandy or some gross liquor and keeps insisting on kissing. We finish, there’s a pumpkin-scented cleanser in the shower that’s amazing. The trick is sweet and uncomfortable, he pays me and I go into the lobby, which looks like some rich person’s living room. I count the money, and sure he paid 200, but don’t I deserve a tip for chatting up his not-quite-daughter?
On my way home, I look at the pictures of rescued dogs and cats at the Pacific Heights animal shelter. The place is immaculate, even elegant—all the adopted pets in the pictures are adults and that’s nice because it’s harder to find them homes. They all have stories and names. My favorite is a cat named Shadow who has long whiskers and likes to cuddle with his best friend Casper. Somehow I end up going over to see that same guy who pumped my face like two years ago, and then asked if I’d had stuffing for dinner. He was an asshole, but we talk on the phone sex line and I’m not even horny, but he wants to fuck my face and then I’m walking over to his house at 2:30 a.m. instead of getting ready for bed. I can’t fall asleep before 5 a.m. anyway. There’s nothing more amazing than City Hall Plaza deserted and glowing at 3 a.m., except maybe how many homeless encampments are nearby. But that’s a different kind of amazing.
Ralowe and I are walking by Gavin Newsom’s campaign headquarters and every press van in the city is there, what’s going on? President Clinton is arriving in half an hour, Ralowe and I plan a demo in fifteen minutes and we get ten people screaming Napa Wines and Big Fat Lines, Kill Bill, and RACIST—it’s fun! Chrissie says she was sucking this guy’s dick and he said yeah suck that cock bitch, Chrissie said if you wanna call me bitch then that’s another fifty. He actually gave her another fifty.
U.S. troops admit to mistakenly bombing a house in Iraq, killing nine children—six months after the war supposedly ended. In Cincinnati, the cops kill another black man and the city responds by deciding to issue the cops non-lethal weapons, in addition to the lethal ones. So now they can tase people after they shoot them. But in Paris there’s a McDonald’s that striking workers have occupied for nine months. Meanwhile, Rue’s on the internet for six hours researching flashlights for doomsday. Ralowe’s quote of the day: this guy looked like he was gonna pull out his inheritance and hit me with it. I wonder what I’d find if I had a secret camera inside the ceiling—rotting corpses and shit from so many different animals. Chrissie calls to cancel our dinner plans and she sounds tweaked, she says: I went in for a gonorrhea swab and they took a whole chunk of my ass, it still burns—now I’m sure you know about conspiracy theories, about plenty of tests like this before like when gay men thought they were being vaccinated for hepatitis but they were being injected with AIDS, I don’t even know what I need.
Gavin Newsom gets elected; I didn’t think it would depress me this much. The worst part is going to his victory party to protest and there are only about twenty of us. We congratulate the attendees on electing a racist mayor, but it isn’t really fun. Standing out there in the rain, we’re yelling at blank faces while trying to spot the bigwigs. Our signs are soaked, and it feels totally disempowering. Ralowe gets arrested for mooning someone, but luckily we get him out. I sleep so terribly my eyes hurt, and then I sit in the house all day feeling like I’m going to cry, and staring at the walls until I get hungry, then eating and staring at the walls.
The closest thing I get to outdoor sun exposure is gazing into the deep blue sky at dusk. Today it’s raining again, and every car wants to hit a pedestrian, any pedestrian. I go to the post office, and I’m enjoying my runway back down Polk Street when Jenna calls to cancel our dinner plans. There goes my structure for the day. I go home and try not to get back in bed, actually I get in bed but I try not to get under the covers.
Rue doesn’t believe I’ve got rats in my walls, but then he’s over the house and there’s one squealing. We both jump—Mattilda, he says, that was a rat! Oh yeah, it’s in the walls. Are you sure it’s not in the house? Honey—let me have my denial and eat it too!
Rue says she’s gaining weight and none of her pants fit, that’s after I say if I can’t exercise soon, then I’m going to have to start wearing layers at all times like junior high, sweating in the sun and Mattilda, how come you don’t take off those six layers? I want to tell Rue that none of my pants fit either, but I can’t. I know it’s ridiculous, but it’s scarier than talking about incest, or maybe it is talking about incest—hiding and hating my body, poor helpless body.
The first chewing o
f the day and I feel like my jaw is stapled to my face—relaxation exercises don’t work! Am I allergic to the air purifier? I can’t tell if the full-spectrum light is hurting my eyes, but something is. Looking outside, I’m having a Seattle moment because you can see the sun through the clouds today—high clouds—oh, how pretty! On the news: U.S. soldiers slaughter Afghani children while attempting to root out terrorists, Queen Elizabeth has surgery on her face to remove some benign lesions.
Okay, say there’s a roomful of guys jerking off on my face and then there’s a golden retriever—who gets the come? Well, I get it first, and then whatever falls onto the ground, the golden retriever can lap up. Though I’m scared of kissing people when I think they might have been sick recently. I’m standing on Mission, waiting for the bus, and I just lose it. I know that if I eat I’ll feel better, but I’ve just walked eight blocks up Valencia, with my bag—high hypoglycemia, plus I kept running into people but now I’m left waiting for the bus with burning hands. There are no seats at this stop, so I can’t eat—I don’t want to hold my food because it will hurt too much.
I go home and I’m a disaster, pacing around, craving lines, wondering if I should get dressed up and go out, but where would I go? I call everyone; no one answers. When I hang out with Rue, she talks about not fitting into her pants again, and I say I can’t fit into mine either.
Benjamin tells me how her sister is trying to get out of an abusive relationship, and how Benjamin’s afraid the boyfriend’s going to kill her. The boyfriend’s totally brainwashed Benjamin’s sister into thinking she’s worthless, and she cooks for him, gets him more beer. And she’s a feminist, Benjamin says, she’s just totally internalized this idea that as a tranny, she’s worthless—and she’s worried that if she leaves her boyfriend then she’ll have no one to deal with but the tranny chasers—and we know how bad they are—gay men are awful, but they’re nothing compared to tranny chasers. Tranny chasers mix fetishism with unbelievable amounts of denial and then act like you’ve asked for it.
The U.S. captures Saddam, so there’s no evil left. Benjamin’s talking about all her friendships with white upper-middle-class intellectual academic types, the other day I asked her what she got from them. She says she really likes the theory, how to a certain degree they can understand things through these discourses, she uses that word on purpose. I say the only problem is that they don’t apply what they learn, on any level. Benjamin says yeah, I feel like they study these critiques of anthropology, and then they enact the same fucked-up shit on me—when my sister was in danger and you were decomposing, I called Ralowe and said: tell me you’re all right. Maybe I was being melodramatic, but he called me back from the bathrooms at UC Berkeley, started talking about a hot boy he’d just cruised. I thought: you’re not all right, but you don’t know it.
The good news is that I’ve figured out that it’s not the full-spectrum light that’s giving me this horrible headache, deep underneath my eyebrows and up through my skull, because today I haven’t turned the light on, and the headache is worse than ever—must be the dust mites crawling all over my bed, or the mold growing underneath the sink. But what’s the bad news—well, you know the joke. Somehow, when I’m heating water for the nasal lavage, the water doubles in volume—is someone adding water to my water?
On the radio, a portrait of Rivercrest, a town in Texas near coalburning plants, where thirty percent of children suffer from birth defects due to mercury poisoning. The mercury gets dumped into the river and the fish absorb it. A local woman talks about going to a fish fry and saying what are you doing—you know what’s in these fish! The response is always the same: we’ve been eating them all our life, we’re gonna die anyway—and we have to eat something.
Chrissie comes over at 2 a.m. to give me twenty dollars, she says well I can’t do any more speed, I’ve done it four times since I’ve been back, but I’ve only shot it once! I just can’t do any more speed, Mattilda—I hit my Saturn return and now I want to get to a point in my life when I can take care of myself, and maybe other people too instead of just relying on everyone; I just hope someone’s at Luke’s when I get there so I can say no thanks, I don’t want any of that—you can snort it or shoot it or whatever and I’ll just fuck you all night.
Eric and I drive out to the beach around midnight and it’s beautiful, so much foam and so many stars. Eric walks faster when we pass a group of people and I look toward them to say hello. They look away. Eric talks about going back to Virginia, and how his brother’s in the Marines, and Eric caught him looking at gay porn—but his brother doesn’t know that, though he showed Eric a picture of his best friend who got discharged. Eric looked at the picture and the guy was a flamer, Eric said why did he get discharged? His brother said can’t you tell—it’s obvious.
Outside on Christmas Day, there’s some guy giving homeless chic with a derby hat and a coat with a fake fur hood, what do they call those? Anyway, he’s got all this luggage, and he’s certainly not homeless, but then the luggage isn’t Vuitton either. But what is he waiting for?
For me, obviously, ready to fuck his face until next Christmas, but that’s another story—and anyway, I need a libido first. Speaking of cash, no one’s calling my new hooker ad; new because the BAR lost the old photo, which really was fucking priceless. I need to get the photos that guy took six months ago, I asked him to send them to me and he said he didn’t have the four dollars. Don’t you work at Wells Fargo Bank—take a cash advance, Lance! He really is a Lance, black guy working some kind of white boy realness; only I’m not exactly sure what kind.
There’s no business. Right? Like show business. Okay—I see where you’re going. There’s no business—none? Like we don’t all know that one. The point, Ralowe says, is that once you’re on the inside, you’re always there. But what movie is that from? Sister Act II. Outside, a woman wearing a white, white cowboy hat smacks a woman wearing a sideways trucker cap—my hat is bigger than yours! A boy rides by on a bike; he’s wearing all tan—fully giving tan-ness. Ralowe wants to know if people are taking it. They are.
Walking outside into the glory of 4:45 p.m. winter sunshine, I catch the bus like a tennis ball—thrown, not hit, darling. Everything’s wonderful until the sun goes down, which doesn’t take long, and then I’m losing it, again, on the MUNI. But what are you losing? Everything. Potato, po-tah-to, Escondido, Escondato. A fake cable car drives by, with a tour guide announcing the sights: “San Francisco is a mecca for homeless people.” It’s the first time I barely notice New Year’s, except for all the police cars driving by right around 2 a.m., and everyone screaming around midnight. I go to Lafayette Park and suck some guy’s dick. He’s not touching me enough. Afterwards, I look at the stars.
Aaron says I’m sorry I’ve been out of touch, my father died in November and then I had nightmares for a month and a half; I stopped taking Dalmane because I was sleeping all the time anyway, so why take sleeping pills—I’ve been coughing up blood again, and it’s not good when you have a slow drain. I finally cleaned it out with a plunger, no chemicals, but there’s still blood splattering the mirror. Did you know that the word paradise comes from Farsi, literally it means mud walls? Every year there’s a list of banished words put out by the University of Michigan in some small town, this year they started the list with “metrosexual.”
Okay, so it’s 4 a.m., I’m completely wired—I’ve already taken a sleeping pill, so I get up. I look in the refrigerator and something smells rotten, I mean something’s smelled rotten for several days, and I’ve been worried that somehow the rats were in my refrigerator laying eggs. Anyway, so I’m looking into all these plastic containers, and there’s all this rotten shit in my refrigerator—so, at least there’s something to snack on, right?
The next night I talk to Eric, who’s still in Virginia visiting his parents, he says he’s been going to bed at 9 a.m. and getting up at 5 p.m.—the workday schedule is ingrained in all of us! So then I don’t feel so bad; when I get up, I’m no
t as much of a mess as I expected. Until later, when I’m sitting at the restaurant with Ralowe and Liz, head in my hands, or not quite in my hands but I’m rubbing my hands, all over the side of my head because it hurts so much. I go home and listen to scratch djs who are brilliant but the music’s crap, but why on earth did I get the fucking Party Monster soundtrack?
I wake up at some horrible horrible time in the morning, look at the clock and—oh, no—its 1:20 p.m. Today’s public radio warning: terrorists could use almanacs to cause harm. Don’t let your child outgrow the stroller until you’ve got the right leash. Meet the man who invented the Cosmopolitan! But wait: are you a low-level associate of insurgents? It’s one of those days when I’m trying to harvest energy so that I can harness it—do you know what I mean, even with all these farming and energy and maybe even livestock metaphors? I finally go to a chi gung class—it’s all right, but I hurt a muscle in my right foot.
Why does every mattress I get cave in within two weeks? I guess I’ve only had two, but it’s happened to both of them. The other one I kept for three years anyway, because it was non-returnable. This one I’ve had for a couple months now, but I can exchange it at any time, I made sure of that. But I keep trying to convince myself that it couldn’t really be caving in—maybe the floor is tilted, or the frame isn’t attached right.
Preventative medicine: today I’ve bitten my lip at least five times, inside there’s a small swollen sore with pus, but I’m craving the Power Exchange. Not a good idea, so that’s where the preventative part comes in—jerking off on the phone, after this guy tells me he wants me to sit on his cock and milk the load out. Or maybe that’s what I want. He’s got a familiar voice, soft and masculine and I’m eager to shoot my load in the sink, which isn’t really that fun.
So Many Ways to Sleep Badly Page 20