“Are you a… virgin?” Ben asks.
I totally scoff.
“Don’t you get it, Ben?”
“Get what?”
“We’re the same.”
“I don’t… hmm…”
“You see. You and me. We’re friends. We’re good friends. We’re the best of friends. Now, I know what you’re capable of. You know what I’m capable of.”
“Um… yeah.”
“And we don’t really need anyone else. We don’t. Screw everyone else. You and me, Ben, against the world.”
“Against the world.”
“Yeah. Screw them. Screw them all out there walking through their stupid little lives, all perfect—thinking they’re perfect. Making babies. Making money. Thinking themselves all so much better than you and me, Ben.”
“Yeah.”
“All those assholes out there… all those useless, heartless, soulless pieces of trash—they all think they’re better than us, Ben!”
A few old, jaundiced faces swivel toward us. “Not you, of course,” I tell them. “I mean, how could you think you’re better than us? Seriously? Look at yourselves!”
Ben puts up his hands in a cool fashion, ensuring no one takes offense or gets mouthy with us.
“Also… also,” I say, my head bobbing and weaving, my vision going blurry.
“What is it?”
“You think you have amnesia?”
“I’m pretty goddamned certain of that.”
“No… no no no. I mean, you think you have amnesia, you know, and… you know, I think I have a mild form of it. Stuff… stuff is coming back to me lately. Stuff I’d completely forgotten. Stuff I’d not remembered in years and years despite all my trips to flippin’ Madelyn. Loads of help she’s been.”
“You think you’re an amnesiac, too?” he asks, cynical, mostly annoyed. But he can’t bring me down because Phil Collins’s “Sussudio” is on the jukebox and I’ve been learning a lot about myself lately, thanks to Ben. It’s like I didn’t even know who I was before this amnesiac came into my life.
“Yeah… I didn’t remember, until recently, that I firebombed my ex’s house in high school.”
“If she was actually your ex.”
I pshaw him.
“Anyway, also… also, I did… I really really did,” I say, putting my hand on his shoulder and giving Ben my sincerest expression, “think that Taylor Townsend was my ex-girlfriend and that she screwed me over and wound up wealthy and well-off in that house in Oak Park.”
“Ian.”
“Yeah?”
“Being delusional is not the same as amnesia, man.”
“No! No no no. You don’t get it, Ben. You and me—we’re the same. We’re the same!”
“OK, man. I think you’ve had enough to drink. I think you’ve had enough.”
“One more round!” I shout to the bar and the eleven or so people there give me hangdog looks of expectation.
“Look, Ian, I’m actually a little broke…”
“One more round!” I yell again. “For everyone! For you! My friends! On me!” I stand up from my stool and raise my hands up, ready to bathe my people in any amber poison of their choice. My eleven disciples rejoice, clap, and offer their thanks from all sides of the bar. They cheer and mutter unintelligible words to each other through toothless mouths.
Ben, himself, concedes to one more drink.
I feel good.
I feel like Jesus turning water into wine.
I feel like Jesus.
When fresh whiskeys are slammed on the bar before us, Ben leans forward over his, remains silent.
“Ben?”
“Yeah?”
“That stuff about my ex…”
“It’s all a joke, right? You’re making it all up?”
“No. No… it’s just… that’s not all.” I take a sip of my whiskey and ice hits my teeth. It hurts. It hurts worse when I realize all my whiskey is gone already.
“It’s not?”
“No. Also… also, my brother… my brother… he…. I mean, I cut off his leg. I cut off his leg. That’s why he has a fake one. Because I cut off his leg. I cut it off. When we were… when we were babies. Just babies.”
“Hmm… hey, listen, Ian.”
“Yeah?”
“My vision quest was actually a long drinking binge. I spent all my money on booze and whores and motel rooms.”
“That’s not so bad.”
“And I’m broke.”
“Oh.”
“I don’t think I can cover August’s rent, man.”
“No?”
“No.”
“Oh, well, you know, that’s OK. That’s OK. I’ll cover ya. I’ll cover ya for August. You don’t have to pay August’s rent.”
“No?”
“No.”
“Thanks, man. You’re a true friend.”
“We’re the same,” I tell him.
“Yeah.”
CHAPTER 20.
“You’re wondering why I brought you here,” Ben says, his voice calm and collected.
“Um… to this place called… Fisters?” I ask, standing in that now-familiar alleyway in Uptown, the sun a few miles east just now pulling itself out of the horizon’s clutches.
It’s quiet, and cool. I’m always surprised how a city of so many millions can ever be so still. Uptown, at the moment, feels nearly abandoned. A few legless people, and a few more suffering the effects of brain-eating bacteria, sloth through the gutters up and down North Broadway, but mostly it’s peaceful, almost idyllic. In fact, I just saw a ruddy faced paperboy trundle down the street flinging his wares at darkened storefront entrances.
“Yeah. Fisters. Don’t worry, it’s not as bad as it sounds.”
“Oh, I’ve never been here. Why would I come to a place like this?” I blurt out, nervous. A morning summer breeze caresses my receding hairline and I’m mollified.
“Uh, yeah. Listen, I get this sense that you have a lot of… built up tension, man. You—you need to unwind. All this talk of firebombing ex-girlfriends’ houses and chopping off legs—I, well, you know what it sounds like to me?”
“Like a pack of lies, I know. But, honestly, Ben, I’m not fibbing.”
“It sounds like someone that needs to get laid.”
“Oh. But, Ben, I should clarify,” I say as Ben opens the pasty black front door of Fisters and waltzes in. He walks in front of me down the narrow dark hallway. The leather-chapped fella with the beer-belly is nowhere to be seen. The TV overhead is mute but still shows a film. It’s a grey landscape being taken over, in slow motion, by a plague of black asps. As soon as the landscape is blacked out, the tape loops back and repeats.
I’m still reeling from all the whiskey drunk at Joe’s and, before that, at the twelfth-floor bar. I stop for just a second to support myself against the black wall and when I look up, Ben’s gone. My heart races, my mouth cottons, and my vision straightens—but only briefly before vibrating all around the edges again. I’m not seeing double, or triple, as I’m now more in a state of alcoholic shock and dehydration. I think my body, which tingles all over a millimeter below the skin, is fighting off the abuse and responding with small doses of adrenaline.
I feel like absolute hell, and also on top of the world, both at the same time.
I also feel like if anybody looks at me cross-eyed I might just tackle them and tear their lips and eyelids off with my teeth.
“Ben!” I shout and scurry down the hallway.
About forty feet in, I turn into the entrance for the DVD room. It’s dimly lit, mostly by the TVs in the corners of the room showing various extreme forms of pornography. Little Virgin Mary nightlights also give the room a bit of a dozy yet cracked-out atmosphere.
“Ben!” I again shout then notice the ruffle of the blue curtain leading to the dungeon.
Pushing through the curtain, it becomes clear this establishment is indeed open. There’s a few unnhhs and ahhhs and ohhhs coming from the red-cu
rtained booths on my right.
Ben’s near the end of the long hallway. He’s talking to the wall. I see his lips moving, but all I hear are moans and groans and SCREAMS. His lips keep moving. A slender hand reaches out from the wall and Ben slips something into it.
“OK, you’re all set, man,” Ben says, a mild grin pulling at his lips.
“Listen, I didn’t cut off my brother’s leg,” I say, panicked.
“Shit, man. I know that.”
“No. I didn’t. I put a half-dozen baby black snakes in his sleeping bag when we took a vacation to the Grand Canyon and were camping out in the desert. He was six and I was ten.”
“Uh… Ian…”
“We had a tent to ourselves, and our parents had their own. I put these baby snakes in his sleeping bag and when he got in after a day of way too much walking, he was already cranky and whining like a little spoiled brat. But when he got into that sleeping bag, Ben—Jesus, I’ve never heard screams like that in my whole life. Not before then. And not since.”
“Ian…”
“He couldn’t get out of his sleeping bag because his legs were cramping up—both from the snakebites and all the walking we did around stupid, dusty Arizona. He couldn’t get out and the snakes just kept biting. I was paralyzed. I just watched. I just watched and watched until my parents finally tore into our tent and pulled him out of that sleeping bag.”
“Ian, I…”
“My dad got nipped a few times in the forearm, but because the snakes’ poison wasn’t that strong, it really only affected my brother, because he was so little. We raced to the nearest hospital, which was forty miles away, but by the time we got there the poison had eaten away at the tissue and soaked into his marrow. They had to amputate his left leg, just above the knee, to prevent the poison from traveling up his bone marrow into the rest of his body.”
“Seriously, Ian…”
“I didn’t even know the snakes were poisonous. I stumbled across a nest near our campsite and I… well, I just swooped down and picked a whole bouquet of them up, thinking I had the best trick in mind to scare my brother straight. You see, my little brother always acted like he was the boss of me, even though he was the little brother! And my parents—Jesus, they encouraged it! Whenever he tried to outrank me I would clobber him and he would cry and my parents would tell me to do whatever it was that he had wanted me to do before I clobbered the little bastard. Really, can you believe that?”
“I can, Ian. Listen…”
“But I didn’t know they were poisonous. I put them in his sleeping bag and he lost his leg—because of me.”
“Really, Ian, I know… shit, man, that’s terrible. But, you were just a kid and—”
“He’s a goddamned cripple because of me!”
“you didn’t know what you were doing. You were just a kid.”
“You don’t understand…”
“No, you don’t understand. I’m paying Shirley back there by the minute. You need to get your balding ass back there and give her the best two minutes of your life. I really don’t have enough money for much more.”
“Ben…”
“Go, man! And don’t worry, there’s some weird shit that goes on in this place but Shirley’s mostly vanilla. Go, have a good time.”
“You don’t understand, Ben,” I say, feeling a sense of relief at unburdening myself, but also a sadness at having found it so difficult to express myself. And I really want to be understood by someone. Just one person, at least.
“I don’t?” he asks, impatient, looking back down the long groaning hallway lit by electric candles.
“Yeah. It’s not just that I’m responsible for my own brother’s disability. And it’s not that I’m the reason I made that little human being scream in such an ear-wrenching, heart-wrenching way…”
“No?”
“No. It’s that I… I have spent every day since then longing to hear someone scream like that again.”
CHAPTER 21.
It’s three days later (I called out sick to work Thursday and Friday) and Ben and I are sitting under the blazing August sun, relishing the dog days of summer from seats along the third baseline in Wrigley Field. The Yankees are in town, and I guess Ben likes this New York team and really really wanted to see them play some sportsball. Tickets were sold out for some reason but I was able to find them on Stubhub for quite the pretty penny. I balked (a baseball term, I’ve recently learned) at entering my credit card when I saw the total for two tickets would be over four-hundred dollars, but Ben seemed giddy as a just-crowned beauty queen at the prospect of seeing his favorite team throw a little ball around and try to swat at it with a piece of wood. So, I thought, what the hell, you only live once, and made the purchase.
After all, I couldn’t have expected Ben to pay for those tickets. I mean, he was broke. Also, he finally admitted on that very early Thursday morning that he was, indeed, the janitor at Fisters. He said since we were having open confessionals he figured I should know. I asked why he chose such a dark and dirty job and he reminded me that he doesn’t have a social security number. His options were limited.
Sex-shop janitor pays OK, but not enough to support a two-week bender full of hookers, whiskey, and sleazy motel rooms. He also paid for my “two minutes” as he likes to put it. However, after my confession, he had another little powwow with Sheryl to ensure I got exactly what I wanted. I haven’t, I admit, had sex in a very, very, very long time, but that’s not what I wanted just then in the dusky dawn hours. No, Sheryl, who usually works in the small booths where handjobs are the service du jour, moved across the hall to the green-curtained room because a little extra space was necessary. Indeed, I remembered her from my first jaunt through these wicked halls, bored and mechanical in her duties. I’m responsible for her job suddenly requiring new responsibilities, in which I hope she found some sense of fulfillment. Behind that green curtain, Sheryl lit candles and incense and let me whip her across the buttocks for ten minutes with a beaded whip called a cat o’ nine tails.
She wailed and wailed.
I knew it was all for show, that I wasn’t really hurting her more than she’s used to—or even more than she likes—but it still fulfilled a burning desire, momentarily. And it wasn’t the kind of scream I really needed to hear, either, but it sufficed. It also warmed my heart that Ben’s concern wasn’t some vicarious, bro-ish “let’s get my buddy laid” scenario so he could hear all the sordid details while wagging his tongue and licking his palm and asking for high-fives. No, his concern was truly one in which he was intent on getting me something I needed.
And while I did not have sex with that woman, Sheryl, I did indeed “finish.” It was glorious. I walked out of that chamber (leaving Sheryl as she smiled sweetly and placed her reddened buttocks into a bucket of ice) with a sense of accomplishment and a sense of relief. Two senses I only realized then that my life had been lacking.
After that we got breakfast at this little pancake house right next to the old Riviera concert hall. Over my tofu scramble I continued to unburden my soul. I explained to Ben that after my brother lost his leg I was yanked out of school and put into homeschooling. My mother said she didn’t know what was wrong with me, but she was determined to figure it out. And because of my sins committed against my brother, I was effectively put under house arrest for the better part of the next two years. I wasn’t allowed to go anywhere without adult supervision, and if I ever wanted to play with a friend, well, that friend had better come to my house. It didn’t take long before my friends found better friends—friends that could race their BMXs all over the neighborhood; friends that could explore large concrete drainage pipes like they’re the Goonies; friends that could run around abandoned construction sites looking for treasure; and friends that could go to the public swimming pool and wonder together why their shorts grew tight whenever girls in bathing suits smiled at them.
While my house arrest ended shortly before my eighth-grade year of homeschooling began, I
found at that time that it was hard for me to leave the house or find reason to. So, I made no new friends and I didn’t regain the ones I previously had. To make matters worse, my mother halted the homeschooling a semester into freshman year of high school, having all but forgotten why she was doing it in the first place. So, there I was, fourteen-years-old, birthed into high school, wet behind the ears, and scared silly after being out of school (and friendless) since sixth grade.
High school was hell, I assured Ben, who seemed to mostly listen as he wolfed down ham, sausage, bacon, eggs, pancakes, and toast and jam. He slurped at his coffee and nodded and grunted punctuation to my story. I thanked him for listening and let him know that thanks to him I could finally tell Madelyn to take a hike after all these years of being no help. He motioned to the waitress for another coffee and grunted his understanding.
When the bill came I picked it up, gladly.
So, here we are, at Wrigley Field, enjoying sunshine, beautifully manicured grass, and that extraordinary brick wall covered in ivy. I’m standing in line at the concessions now because Ben asked me to get him a Bud. I’m going to get myself a mai tai in one of those plastic souvenir cups and I’m quite giddy about it. So giddy, in fact, that I’ve zoned out and the guy behind me is jabbing me in the shoulder blade with a fingertip, muttering something.
“Terribly sorry,” I say, turning to face this testosterone-filled bag of meat. He’s muscular, wearing a sleeveless blue top and his Cubs hat backward. “Is poking someone in the back the new way to say excuse me?”
“Move your ass,” this beast orders. The line behind him looks anxious and the heavyset black woman at the metal concessions counter is asking me what I want. A few people at the back of the line tell me to get a move on and I’m flustered by all the activity, unable to decide if I should turn around and ignore the dunderhead or really give him a piece of my mind.
“I…” I mumble, fingering the cash in my hand meant for our fun summer drinks.
“I said move your ass, faggot!” He shoves me hard with both hands and I stumble backward, hitting my lower back against the counter. I drop the cash. The concessions lady barks something in my ear while a few teenagers in the line encourage the jock to kick the crap out of me.
Y Is for Fidelity Page 14