by Lucy Taylor
Toronto was a city where you could find anything, and Nicholas, at one time or another, in one capacity or another, had provided or partaken of all. As he drove the depressingly familiar streets, he saw that nothing had changed significantly since his days here – the whores still strutting on stiletto-thin spikes, the prancing drag queens in glitter and fake fur and tiny, tight leather skirts, the hustlers cold-eyed and crotch-heavy, sexy dangerous. Fuck me, fuck me, buy me, buy me – the eternal mantra of desire and despair.
The rain had tapered off, leaving a chilly moistness in the late summer air and grey, glassy puddles. Nicholas parked the car under a stoplight and walked up Yonge Street, checking in sex parlors and bookstores and gay clubs as he went. Valdez’s name elicited little response in those he queried, other than occasionally, feigned ignorance followed by a sudden, apparently urgent, need to be somewhere else.
“Sonny Valdez? Yeah, I know him. But didn’t that fucker croak years ago? Didn’t he have heart cancer, dick cancer – or maybe he just was a cancer?”
The slant-eyed woman who was speaking was a sodden wreck, breasts like huge jellyfish that swayed beneath her see-through blouse, a pendulous belly, eyes ringed with grey-yellow smudges. She sat at the end of the bar in the Cha Cha Lounge and tried to pick up guys, and people moved their seats to get away from her.
“No, Sonny Valdez didn’t die,” said Nicholas. “He was supposed to die. They let him out of fucking prison so he could go home to die, but then he didn’t die.”
The woman eyed him with bleary, wet-brain eyes. “So you already know that, then why you asking me?”
“I need to find him.”
“You want sweet pussy, you don’t need Sonny for that: you found it right here.” She leered and spread her bloated thighs, thumped a hand on her crotch.
Nicholas threw down some money for his drink and headed for the door. The barmaid, a tiny girl with crooked lips and short, raggedy black hair, dashed after him. The expression on her face was so intense he thought that, in his haste to escape, he must have miscalculated his tab.
“You after Sonny?”
“I’m not after him. I want to find him, though.”
“Wellll . . . maybe . . .”
He pulled out his wallet, counted off a trio of bills.
“Where is he?”
“He’s got a suite at the Mayflower Hotel.”
“A suite? Last time I saw Sonny, he was holed up in a fleabag hotel without a pot to piss in.”
“He was sick, then. Now that he’s back on his feet, he’s got business deals going again. Entrepreneurial endeavors, he calls them.”
Nicholas snorted. “Right. Anything you can snort, shoot, smoke, or fuck, Sonny’s got a hand in it. How do you know the son-of-a-bitch, anyway?”
“I do him favors. Bring him his groceries a coupl’a times a week. Hold his hand, suck his dick, listen to him babble.”
Nicholas felt a twinge of alarm. “The cancer – it didn’t come back?”
“Oh, no, he’s healthy,” she said, “but he don’t like to go outside if he don’t have to. His head’s fucked up. He’s scared of something, scared so bad he don’t even want to talk about it.”
He’s healthy. How those words sang in Nicholas’s head. How ironic, given how fervently he’d once wished Sonny Valdez dead.
A few years back, he’d actually gone up to Toronto just to see for himself that what he’d heard was true, that Sonny had been released from prison, where he’d done five years of a twelve-year stretch for drug dealing so he could come home to die. Nicholas had wanted to be sure. He’d told Beth that Sonny was a buddy from his old neighborhood in Chicago, and he was going up to Toronto to pay his respects. Which, in a weird way, he supposed was true.
He’d found Sonny much as he’d imagined he’d be, living in one room of a hotel for the indigent subsidized by the government, looked in on by a sour-faced Filipino hospice worker who barely spoke English. By the time he got there, even to an untrained eye, it was obvious that death was on the verge of crawling into bed with Sonny. He lay staring at a tiny TV set, eyes rheumy, vacant, skin the color and texture of old newspaper. He didn’t recognize Nicholas, but kept both hands underneath the dirty sheet, rubbing at himself as though his flaccid dick were an Aladdin’s lamp from which a genie or orgasm might yet appear.
Nicholas took a long look, saw what he wanted to see, then muttered under his breath “Rot in hell, Sonny,” and turned to leave.
He didn’t think that Valdez could even hear him and was shaken when the man said, in a cracked, tortured voice, “Maybe so. But you’ll get there before me, motherfucker.”
The false bravado of a dying man, Nicholas had thought. The cancer coring out his brain along with his vocal cords.
Although he bought the Toronto paper for a few weeks after that, he never saw any notice of Sonny’s death: but then, why should he? How many drug-dealing pimps rate a paragraph in the obituary column anyway?
With Sonny presumably gone, Nicholas had exhaled a three-year long sigh of relief. The scumbag he’d once run drugs for was dead, which meant he didn’t have to fear his former colleague’s long-term propensity for vileness. Didn’t have to worry about Sonny reappearing in his life, exposing parts of his sordid history that not even Beth knew about or trying to blackmail him with the threat of doing so.
It wasn’t Sonny who turned up from his past, however, but an ex-con named Danny Sorenson, a guy who’d been a buddy of Nicholas’s when they were growing up in Chicago. Sorenson hustled luxury cars, stealing them in Detroit, selling them in Miami or Fort Lauderdale. He was imprudent enough to be driving one such stolen vehicle when, looped on crack, he pulled his first and last bank robbery. When Nicholas went to prison, Danny had just gotten transferred down to Canon City Penitentiary in Colorado, after serving two years of a ten-year stretch in Michigan. He’d known Sonny Valdez there. Had, in fact, been Sonny’s little helper in various blackmarket scams.
His first December out of the can, Danny got hold of Nicholas’s number and gave him a call. Christmas time and Danny was lonely and looking for somebody to get shitfaced with.
“No, thanks,” said Nicholas, making a mental note to tell Beth they needed an unlisted number. Then, by way of emphasizing his new, domesticated lifestyle, he’d added, “The wife’s from Toronto. She and I are driving up there to spend Christmas with her family.”
“Hey, that’s an idea,” said Danny drunkenly. “Maybe I’ll head up to Toronto myself, see does old Sonny Valdez know some girls can suck dick like a vacuum cleaner.”
“Sonny’s dead,” said Nicholas. “Cancer. Got let out of prison to die.”
“Yeah, well, I guess he’s resurrected,” Danny said, “ ’cause I seen Sonny less’n a month ago. Slidin’ out of a taxi on King Street with some Asian cookie on his arm.”
Nicholas remembered the wasted wreck of a man he’d visited three years earlier. “Don’t bullshit me, Danny. He’s dead.”
“Man, I talked to him. Asked him what the hell was he doin’ alive. He said he found the magic cure. His head’s fucked up, though. You know what he wanted? He asked me to say his name. Just like that. His name. Over and over, while this Asian chick was rolling her eyes, and I’m saying Sonny Valdez, that’s your fucking name, and he’s holding onto my arm, saying, say it, say my name, say it again . . . And then I mention you, and was that a mistake! He goes off on a rant – said you rolled on him, that hadn’t’a been for you he’d a never gone to prison.”
“Bullshit!”
“Yeah, well, like I said, his head’s fucked up.”
They talked for a few more minutes, Danny wanting to reminisce about prison days, Nicholas wanting nothing more than to get off the phone. Later on, he tried to convince himself that Danny Sorenson was drunk or drugged when he had his encounter with “Sonny”, but it didn’t fly. Bizarre as Danny’s tale was – because of that very off-the-wall bizarreness – there was a ring of truth to it.
And if Sonny V
aldez was still alive, there was the chance he might just show up at the door one day and introduce Beth to the Nicholas Berringer she didn’t know – and probably didn’t want to.
The Mayflower Arms was one of the small, swank, boutique-hotels located in the Yorkville district, northwest of Bloor Street. As expensive as it was unsubtle, the lobby Nicholas entered was gilded like a Russian Easter egg, appointed with heavy, dark velvet furniture and Rococo lamps whose shades were supported by languidly stretching nymphs and pirouetting ballerinas. Whatever else was going on with Sonny, he wasn’t hurting for money any longer.
The artfully made-up woman behind the front desk spoke with a French accent so thick it was almost unintelligible, but the fact that she resembled a young Sophia Loren made asking her to repeat herself a pleasure.
Nicholas gave her his real name and was relieved when she rang Sonny’s suite and, evidently, was told to send Nicholas on up. Apparently, Sonny had forgotten the image of Nicholas hovering at his death bed a few years earlier, murmuring “rot in hell”.
The elevator was of the old-fashioned cage design only large enough to accommodate two people. As Nicholas ascended, he found himself imagining how it would be to fuck a woman in such close quarters and such potentially embarrassing circumstances. He thought about Elise, who had come into his life and shattered it and disappeared into the night again like some kind of succubus and about what he’d like to do to her if she were here. Decided the only thing more satisfying than fucking her would be strangling her at the same time.
“What’s this?” Elise had said, looking at the money Nicholas put on the dressing table as though she’d never seen currency before. “I told you, I’m not a hooker.”
“Take it,” he said. “I’d feel better.”
“I hate taking something from somebody when I don’t give nothing back,” she’d said. An odd comment, he’d thought, coming from a woman he’d just spent the last few hours boinking.
“Don’t worry, sweetheart, you gave me plenty.”
She cocked her head, pursed her cupie-doll mouth, pinned him to the wall with her blank blue stare. “Well, you know, you may be right, Nicky. Maybe I did.”
The elevator groaned open. He didn’t need to look for Sonny’s door. It was already open, the view within obscured by the portly drug-dealer’s squat bulk. He wore white sweat pants, a white sweat shirt and running shoes – an outfit which, considering the fact that he must weigh close to two hundred and fifty pounds now, gave him the air of a thuggish gnome. A highball glass, clinking with ice cubes, was in one hand.
“Nicky-boy, long time, no see.” Despite the distinctly unwelcoming tone, he extended a spade-shaped hand. “To what do I owe the honor of this impromptu social call?”
“I heard you were still alive, and I wanted to see for myself.”
“Then this is a social call?”
“Not exactly. You gonna let me in?”
Sonny’s face split into two portions, the grinning mouth below, the eyes, fraught with hate and cunning, above. Guardedly, like someone relishing a private joke, he motioned Nicholas in.
They sat opposite each other, in fat-cushioned chairs with an absurdly fragile-looking glass-topped coffee table between them, hunched over like men closing a questionable deal. Sonny drank gin. Nicholas had a Scotch, which he intended to nurse, but ended up swigging down like soda in an effort to make this encounter less unbearable.
For his part, Sonny chugged his drink like a man facing a firing squad the next morning. He filled his glass again, leaned back, stroked his scruffy beard. “You look good, Nicky-boy. You look – respectable, prosperous. You must be proud of yourself. From a hot-looking young street kid to drug-dealer to hard-timer to – look at you now, what are you, thirty-five? – a well-dressed businessman, probably married to some sweet woman who has no idea about your past. You are married, am I right? Her name’s Beth, I believe.”
“How the hell do you know about her?”
“Oh, I got ways. That fuck-up Danny Sorenson, he needed a job, so I hired him to do a little PI work. He says you made a good life for yourself there in Detroit. You got a lot to be proud of, Nicky-boy. Not many men could make the transition you did. If the streets don’t eat them alive, prison does. Hell, I remember when you –”
“I didn’t come here to reminisce,” said Nicholas. “I came because I want to know why you aren’t dead. I want to know what happened, the name of your doctors, what drugs you took, the clinic you went to, if it was one of those places in Mexico that deals in holistic stuff or something experimental or –”
“Hey, hold on, just hold the fuck on,” said Sonny. “What are you talking about? Who says I went anywhere or did anything to get cured? Who says I was even sick?”
“I saw you, Sonny, remember? I stood by your bedside. You were down to skin and bones. You smelled like a morgue. Plus you were destitute. You didn’t have shit, let alone the big bucks to pay for some fancy cure. So don’t bullshit me. I want to know why you didn’t die, what drugs you took, where you went to get well.”
“Who says I took anything? Who says it weren’t the grace of God? A miracle?”
“Bullshit.”
“What is this, Nicky-boy, you thinkin’ about med school? Trying to get published in some medical journal? If Sixty fucking Minutes shows up wantin’ an interview, maybe I’ll have somethin’ to say, but why the fuck should I talk to you?”
“Because you’ve got to,” Nicholas said. “Because I’m dying.”
So he told Sonny about the night with Elise and the blood test a couple of months later, just being on the safe side, and how the test showed that his white count was decimated, that he was about two T-cells away from full-blown fucking AIDS.
When he finished, there was a beat of silence, like stopped time, while the words hung in the air between them. Then Sonny gave a deep, satisfied sigh, like a man who’s just put away a prime cut of filet mignon, and said, “Will you excuse me a minute, Nicky-boy? What you just said, this shocks me a little bit. I need to take it in.”
Maybe it was the Scotch that dulled Nicholas’s thinking, but he figured Sonny was only going to take a piss or get another drink. Only when Sonny eased himself back into his seat did he recognize the dramatic change in the man’s demeanor, the dreamy slackness of his features, for what it was.
“Fuck, what did you do?” He grabbed Sonny’s wrist and yanked up the sleeve of the sweatshirt – track marks, some old, some very recent.
“China white,” said Sonny, answering the unspoken question. “Pure as twelve-year-old pussy.”
Nicholas recoiled. “You always said only assholes use their own product.”
“Helps me relax,” said Sonny. “Some primo smack and a coupl’a whores and it’s almost like I’m back the way I was before.”
“Before what?”
“What you came here to find out about – the secret to my great good health, the miracle cure.”
Nicholas realized he had only minutes before Sonny nodded off into that floaty, pink-lined dream state between sleep and wakefulness. Heroin limbo.
“So talk. Sonny.”
“You say you’re dying. That’s too bad, Nicky-boy, but you tell me, why the fuck should I give a shit?”
Nicholas had prepared for this. Calmly he pulled the 0.9 mm Biretta out of his jacket and aimed it at Sonny’s head. “Because if you don’t tell me what I want to know, I kill you. Right here, right now. I got nothing to lose, Sonny. I got AIDS, so I’m dead anyway. Taking you with me will just be a bonus.”
Sonny grinned at the gun like it was somebody’s index finger and let loose a laugh. “You can’t kill me, Nicky-boy. Wanna know why? ’Cause there ain’t no me to kill. There is no me. I never was. I never will be. It was all a dream, a fucking fabrication.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
Sonny moved as if to stand up. Nicholas cocked the gun, said in a whisper that was sibilant with menace, “Sit the fuck down.”
/> “I need a drink.”
“You don’t need nothing, Sonny.”
“Say that again.”
“What?”
“What you called me. I like to hear it. Say it again.”
He’s trying to con me into thinking he’s crazy, Nicholas thought, into putting the gun away. Either that, or he’s drugged himself out of his mind. But he answered anyway. “I called you Sonny. That’s your name, isn’t it? Sonny Valdez? Scumbag par excellence. A consummate shit. How’s that?”
“Sonny Valdez, Sonny Valdez.” He shut his eyes, swayed slightly and chanted the words like a schoolyard ditty. So enraged was Nicholas by what he assumed had to be a performance that he shifted the gun to his left hand and backhanded Sonny a stunning blow to the side of the head.
Sonny keeled sideways. But for the heft of the chair arm, he would have collapsed to the floor. Instead, he sagged limply for a second, then righted himself with a slow-motion deliberateness that, under other circumstances, Nicholas would have found unspeakably satisfying.
“How’d you get well, Sonny? Just give me the name of your doctor or your guru or your medicine man and I’ll be on my way. You can OD in peace. I don’t give a fuck.”
Sonny’s eyelids fluttered open. He grinned and shook his head like he was trying to dislodge a gnat from his ear. His eyes gleamed with dark joy and a perverse, soulless pleasure.
“So you stuck your dick in the wrong hole, huh, Nicky-boy? So did I, only that’s not what gave me the cancer. That’s what took the cancer away. Took everything away.”
“What?”
“I’m talking about a piece of ass. A fucking piece of pussy.”
“A woman?”
“You deserve her, Nicky-boy, and everything she’ll do to you. One thing, though – I tell you who she is, you find her, I want you to come back to me and tell me where she is.”
“Why’s that, Sonny?”
But the drug-dealer’s eyes were easing shut. He sighed and snored and then jerked semi-awake, a tic twitching at the corner of one eye.