In Nine Kinds of Pain
Page 13
“Save me from this torture. You torture me alone by not showing yourself to me! The least you could do is tell me if you have given me the sign I desperately long for! Let me know! It is unfair for you to torment my mind so!
“Again, show yourself to me! Show me your face! Show me your hands, that they might comfort me, in this my hour of desperation! Again, Father, tell me your plan for me! Tell me your plan! Show me the way!”
Hanging by his wrapped wrists from the thick tree, he appeared as a skinned sheep, red strips clinging selfishly to bone, lakes of blood to rivers in the cobbled stones of Antonia’s stage. The flagrum that tore him open wasn’t made of lead and bone and leather thong; it was made of hatred and sorrow and betrayal and absence and malice and depravity and scorn.
You have. Not told me. You. Have not saved. Me. You want to. Watch.
You want. To watch me. Die.
You. Want to watch. Me die.
I’ll die. I’ll. Die. But only. If. You show.
Show me. Show. Me. Show me. Why.
Show me why. You want me. To. Die.
Just. Make it stop.
TWENTY-NIN
Father Costa screams.
Baby’s Repressed Memory
Baby suddenly remembers.
The first time she was raped, she now knew, was by Mr. Blackworth. Mr. Blackworth was hard of hearing and smoked a pipe. He sold fresh vegetables from an opened van (the rear bed decapitated by an acetylene torch, probably done in one of the thousand chop shops in Detroit), driving up and down the streets of the neighborhood, the canned words blaring from his megaphone, “Sweet corn, potatoes, beets. SWEEEE-t corn, get it here!” The neighborhood kids liked to jump aboard the van because it was open and went slowly, so they could hop aboard and hop off at any time without hurting themselves. If you timed it right, you could catch a ride from Mr. Blackworth around the time he drove by the park, and it would save you a long walk to the park, and if you were smart, you could get the return ride home. Mr. Blackworth seemed to like kids, but back then, back when Baby was a kid, it didn’t seem that strange, not like today. Parents weren’t suspicious of someone like Mr. Blackworth back then.
He was not a very engaging person. He had a wide smile, full of brown, crooked teeth, and his skin was crusty pale, as pale as a black man could get and still look black. He wore the same clothes every day, and it was speculated as to whether he had many pairs of the same clothes, or just the one set. It was hard to tell, but the smell of him made the former the best possibility.
Baby remembers him rubbing a cucumber against her crotch a few times. He did it very innocently, as though it was socially acceptable, and most of the time it seemed to have been done in fun. Baby didn’t mind because, even at nine, she thought it felt good. That’s why she didn’t tell Mama, because she didn’t want him to get into trouble, and she didn’t want him to stop. Looking back, it must have been Mr. Blackworth’s way of indoctrinating her into liking sex, or the feel of whatever it was that he was doing.
Eventually, one day during the summer, he parked his van behind the far baseball diamond and rubbed her with himself. No cucumber. Afterwards, he quickly dropped her off at home, right to her door, and didn’t come around for several days. When Baby did eventually see him again, she told him that she didn’t tell anybody what he had done, and could she still ride the van around the neighborhood with him. He smiled his brown, crooked smile, and said yes, and took Baby a few more times to the park that summer to rub himself on her. Baby knew he was doing something wrong, she wasn’t a stupid child, but at least Mr. Blackworth, someone, was paying attention to her and treating her well; at least someone was giving her things and was grateful for her existence and loved her.
It wasn’t until Mr. Blackworth did the same thing to the little girl down the street that he was taken away. It was later in the summer, so Baby didn’t miss him. She knew she wouldn’t see him during the winter anyway, even if he wasn’t caught.
Baby doesn’t know why she suddenly remembers this.
Oxy and Wet
Dallas decides that he will take the duct tape off of Baby’s mouth. He needs to see her mouth. Her lips. He needs to see her lips now. Dallas thinks that the best part of Baby is her lips. He pictures her lips wrapped around him, her eyes looking up at him, her fingers massaging him.
He’s not afraid she will escape. She’s too high to escape. He saw to that. At first, he couldn’t get her to take any of the Oxy—he’d crushed it up, she’d blown it off his finger. So he was forced to hit her. He was forced to smack her one, a really hard one, right across her lovely face. Ironically, right across her lovely mouth. Of course, she still had the duct tape on, so it probably didn’t hurt her as badly as anyone who saw the slap would think.
She snorted some anyway. Maybe to ward off the pain. Baby was/is obviously in pain. Dallas wonders why. Is it from the beating she apparently took from her boyfriend, or whoever gave her the black eye? Dallas doesn’t know what happened to her. But he knows he was trying to help her by giving her the chance to snort some Oxy. The Oxy will take away the pain. Dallas knows this. Of course, if Dallas was really familiar with Oxy, as Baby obviously was—Hell, she had a whole bag of this shit!—he wouldn’t be here now. He would have never left his house once he discovered this magnificent distraction. Oxy, Dallas is sure, makes the world go ’round. This is the stuff that makes it all happen. This is the stuff that keeps the streets on the beat, the wind blowin’, the river flowin’, and the animals in the zoos howl with delight. Dallas now knows why dopers are dopers, why crackheads are crackheads, and why a person, any person, would go to any length to score some blow just to snort it away so they need more blow. Dallas is now in touch with everything and everyone out there, out his window, the people he hated (and some he still hates), the people who make his life as a cop a living hell. He now knows why. He’s an enlightened man.
Baby doesn’t need the duct tape. He rips all the duct tape off her beautiful face and cuts it from her wrists. She doesn’t need that anymore. She still needs the duct tape around her ankles, securing her to the floor radiator, because Dallas doesn’t want her to walk around. He wants her kept in one place.
“Why do you got all this shit in this bag?” he asks her.
She hasn’t responded to him in hours.
“Why you got all this shit for, Baby? You planning on selling it? This is a lot of shit you got here. You got angel dust, PCP, Hank, and a ton of Oxy and Wet. Where you get Wet? This shit’s gonna kill the streets.”
She looks up at him from the floor through her good eye. She lies on her stomach, hoping it will prevent him from wanting to get on top of her. Of course, he could get behind her, but at least she wouldn’t have to look at him that way.
“You dealing, Baby? You don’t look like no dealer.”
He pulls one of the many Ziplocks of Oxy from the black bag and rips it open. The pills rain like that rainbow candy, only they’re one color.
He pulls out a fist-sized baggy of Wet. He tears it open, and it plops onto the table with a splat. It looks like pond moss.
“I wanna try this shit. That okay with you, Baby? Or this stuff saved for one of your clients?”
She doesn’t respond.
She watches as he takes a pack of rolling papers from the bag and creates. He creates a stogie so big Castro would run for cover. This thing looks like one of those carnival cigars, the kind that explodes. Dallas wraps his lips around it (as he wishes Baby would do to him) and lights it. It takes Dallas several puffs before the monster cigar lights, because the Wet is still too
wet, but he eventually gets the thing lit.
Baby watches as he takes a few deep drags. She doesn’t want to say anything to him. She doesn’t want to respond at all. She doesn’t feel like it. And he doesn’t deserve it. There’s a part of her that feels like defending herself, but she won’t. Fuck this freak, she thinks. I don’t need to tell him shit. Of course she’s not going to deal this stuff (what’s she going to do, put it on eBay?). She just wants the cash. But she knows way too many people that will sell the stuff for her and give her a cut. That’s all she wants. She just wants escape money.
“Baby,” he says, unzipping his pants. He’s slurring already. “Baby, I’m a man. You know? I’m a man! I’m a fucking man! I don’t give a shit what you or Liz or nobody else says! I’m a goddamn man! See? I’m a goddamn man!”
Baby watches as he fondles himself. She notices that he isn’t getting hard. She slowly rolls on her back and sits up, and tries to find the best way to get out of her duct-tape cement shoes through the throb of her head and the waves of nausea that make her want to vomit. And now, now with the clouds of Wet like a London fog in the room, she can barely contain herself in this world. She feels like retreating to her other world, her safe world, the world in her head.
Dallas stops stroking himself and falls to the floor next to her. He brandishes more duct tape like a gunslinger and, before Baby can put the puzzle of her mind together, she finds her hands covered in duct-tape boxing gloves, silver and useless.
“I should get some pictures of this,” he says, “put it up on a website somewheres. Someone’ll pay to see this shit. I donna, what? Baby, you be my star, okay? Huh?”
She dry-heaves.
He laughs.
She closes her eyes.
He forces more Oxy into her nose.
She doesn’t resist it.
Friday
Here is Wisdom
Your friend, Narmer, who’s from New York, never shuts up about it. He’ll bury you with stories about New York City, and how it’s so much better than Detroit. He won’t shut up about it. And when you tell him, as all Detroiters do when they’ve had enough of the loud mouths from other cities, “Well, then, why don’t you just go back there, if it’s so much better!” you realize you’ve stepped into his trap, because now he’ll tell you why he can’t leave, and why he wishes he could leave “your” city. And you’d like to grant all of them that wish, by chopping them up and stuffing their corpses in the next suitcase headed east.
Detroiters, for the most part, hate their city. But they hate it even more when outsiders disparage their city. That’s why Detroiters have such a tough time with sports figures leaving their sports teams. Detroiters feel crapped on when someone, say, a Detroit Tiger, leaves their team to join another team (especially one on either coast), and leaves in a hurry. Detroiters take it very personally.
But it’s not just New Yorkers. You’ve had people from the West Coast come and go in your life, and every time, at least once, you’ve had them tell you what a shit hole you live in, and what a great place they live/lived in when they live/lived somewhere in California. They scold you for your “Midwest values,” as if your values were a bad thing. (The Family, La Rasa, must be a punchline out there.) You listen to their surfer accents, which just sounds like a bad impression of a California surfer accent. You listen to them tell of beaches, knowing their paper-white skin couldn’t handle a day at the beach, and oceans, knowing they can’t swim. They tell of their California lifestyle, so healthy as compared to yours, yet they look like a bowling pin, smoke like a Delray chimney, eat like a pig, and drink until they pass out (sometimes falling off their barstool with their husband having to pick them up as other patrons laugh, and then there’s a fight, and then you’re banned from that bar. Or they pass out on the couch drinking boxed wine while their two-year-old kid is still awake, and the kid decides she’s hungry and wants her mommy to wake up to make her dinner, and when her mommy doesn’t because she’s in a drunken coma the two-year-old kid decides to cook on the stove for herself.) And you know, you’ve heard, that their friends in California were superficial. And that their families no longer speak to them. And that their lives are a cry for help. And maybe they should just kill themselves to put themselves out of their own miseries.
But they still claim their city is better than yours. And you have no defense for it.
Funny about moving out of the city, though—the suburbs are a pain. The people are a pain. A lot of posturing. A lot of bickering. A lot of people-concerned-with-a-lot-of-nothing people. “Your grass is coming through the fence and touching my rose bush!” “Your garbage can was left out longer than the three-hour limit!” “Your dog barked while I was trying to nap!” The thing you learn once you move out of the city and into the suburbs is that in the city they didn’t concern themselves with small, petty, trivial, I’ve-got-nothing-better-to-do things, things that the fake-tanned, dyed-haired, dressed-too-young-for-her-advanced-age suburban soccer mom (who’s always “So busy! So busy!”) concerns herself with because her life is so desolate, she has nothing better to do with herself. She spends her time finding things to do so that she doesn’t have to reflect on herself and how lousy her entire existence is. She drives her SUV to the park (where the rest of the moms who have nothing better to do meet) and she volunteers her time in an organization that doesn’t matter, doing things that don’t matter, only to socialize (gossip) about how horrible her neighbors are and how their new sprinkler heads are detracting from the view from her tiny picture window. They talk and they talk as history crashes around them. And they complain about their husbands, who don’t do enough around the house and drown their own existences at the titty bar after work. Why won’t they come home? <“Don’t he know I have dinner ready?”>
The suburbs are a cultural and societal Waste Land. Wasted time. Wasted breath. Wasted effort. Wasted life. And no reality. No light at the end of the tunnel. Eternal pettiness. Eternal squabbling. Eternal nothingness. At least living in the city you have something real to be concerned with, like life or death. Not overgrown grass.
The Man Who Would Be Sacrificed
Jerusalem, the holiest of cities, is a fracas because of the man who calls himself the Son of God, and the city is weak because of it. Jerusalem is never this tense, but the threat of the Romans to strike, the Sanhedrin to rally, the Syrians to murder, all blow a vile wind over the city and the celebration and cause those who traveled for days into weeks to be there very regretful, and angry. All those who wanted the false Messiah dead—the merchants and the rabbis; the wealthy and the impoverished; the lepers and the deformed; the sheep and the wolves—now wish it over. He is nothing to them, he knows. He broke his promise to them. He was to come upon the earth, the Son of Man, Messiah from On High, and free Jerusalem and the state of Israel from the fist of the Roman Empire. So it says in the Scriptures. So it says that the Son of David would come upon the earth and destroy the oppressors of the Chosen People of David. He was supposed to be that man. He obviously isn’t that man. They now have to wait longer and hope that the real Messiah, the one from On High with a sword, will come into their lifetimes.
Most of the people of Jerusalem crowd around the large stage outside of Antonia to see the fate of the man who commands his powers not as a savior but as a preacher, not as the Messiah of Scripture but as a new, more meekish, Messiah. A Messiah who will watch the Jewish people, the Chosen People, continue to suffer under the wrath of Roman oppression. This is the man who the people hope will die this day.
A servant brings out the chair of Pilate. Pilate comes to the crowd through the stairway closest to the Great Temple.
The man who is to be crucified is brought before Pilate. Pilate is apparently not impressed. He knows of this man’s suffering, of the torture that this man had to endure by his own actions and words, and feels nothing for him. He can see that this is a beaten man. A bloodied man. A man who cannot stand straight, his face now unrecognizable, purple and swollen;
a man probably not even aware of what is happening to him now, probably not conscious of the Jews around him, wildly lashing out at him, spitting at him, calling him names, calling for his execution; a man, drenched in red, who looks no more harmful than the slaughtered lambs that littered the jugular Via Dolorosa.
“What charge do you bring against this man?” Pilate asks.
The high priests of the Sanhedrin begin to scurrily confer amongst themselves.
“This man is a criminal,” the blue-gold Pharisee shouts, “for if he were not, he would not be standing before you!”
“Then why not try him by your laws?” Pilate says. “Why bring him to me?”
“Because,” the blue-gold Pharisee says, “we cannot put a man to death, as is your power. He is a disrupter and a liar!”