Pete trusted me since I nodded along to his bull. So he started to show me the gay stuff before putting it on the rack. For the most part this stuff starred young hustler types, heavily tattooed, being fucked behind little black rectangles. Some dispensed with the rectangles. In a few, hustlers were tied up. Other hustlers, sometimes johns, pawed their crotches and spanked them while they pretended to scream.
Each Saturday Pete would produce a few new articles and let me sit in the stockroom with them for as long as I liked. At some point I realized he meant I could jerk off in peace, so I usually would, with a magazine spread on my knees, left hand holding a Kleenex, right hand turning the pages or jerking myself.
It stayed so dark in that stockroom I couldn't tell what time it was. Sometimes I'd be there for hours and not know. He'd yell, "Closing, twerp," which meant it was eight o'clock. I'd pedal home and tell my furious parents I liked the movie so much I'd stayed to see it a third or fourth time.
I was having sex with other kids by this point. None let me tie them up, but I remember one boy would hold his ankles together, pretending I'd captured him. Then I could spank him extremely lightly until he confessed some sort of secret, such as ... Oh, who cares anymore.
One day Pete asked if I liked the slapping and spanking parts of the magazines best. I said yeah (and I actually did), so he pulled out more violent things, with nipple clamps, handcuffs, and dildos being standard equipment. Normal sex acts had disappeared from these shots. Still, I didn't complain in case he was hoarding items that held some new, even sexier world of ... whatever.
I don't think Pete was after me physically. He never barged in. If he needed something out of the storeroom, he'd stand outside and yell, "Entering," then give me a couple of seconds to zip up or wipe myself off before he lifted the curtain that separated our worlds.
The last time I stopped by, Pete acted upset. Usually he'd make a few lame innuendos, pull out a new batch of stuff, and toss it over the counter to me. This time he started to say something, paused, muttered to himself. I didn't know what to do, so I wandered around the store seeing which magazines had been bought and which hadn't.
Pete motioned me to return to the front. "I have something to show you," he said. "But I don't know if I should." He squinted. "How old are you?" He'd always told me to tell any customer who might ask that I was eighteen, so that's how I answered. "No, no," he said, "I mean really." I told him I was thirteen. He closed his eyes for a second, swore, then asked me very slowly, like someone was forcing him, "Do you want to see items that might scare you a little?" I'd just seen a creature from outer space tear apart buildings, etc., so I said sure.
I followed him into the stockroom. I sat in the usual piss smelling armchair. He reached up on one of the shelves and brought down a small stack of photos. Before he handed them to me he said, "If you don't understand these, we can talk. I'll be . . ." He pointed at the curtain, dropped the photo set into my lap. I looked up. I was totally alone and the curtain was settling back into place.
I didn't understand what was happening in the pictures at first, but after three or four I realized that the model was dead and not laughing or yelling like I'd originally thought. He was lying faceup on a bed. His wrists and ankles were tied with heavy rope, and there was a rope around his neck that I imagined had killed him. His eyes and his mouth were wide open. That's why I'd thought he was laughing. He was pale, cute, and had long, straight black hair. There was nobody else in the photos with him. -
- - - - - - - - -- - - - In the last couple of photos somebody had rolled the boy over, so we could see what he looked like on both sides, I guess. That's when I knew for sure he was dead because instead of an asscrack, he had a crater. It looked as if someone had set off a bomb in his rectum.
I studied the crater calmly for a minute or two before it shocked me. Then I set down the photos extremely gently. I parted the curtain, walked down an aisle and out the front of the store without speaking to Pete, because I couldn't. I remember Pete came to the doorway and stood there fidgeting, watching me unchain my bike. I climbed on, pedaled off. When I was about a half block down the street, I heard him yell, "Wait," then, "Stop that boy," like he thought, or else wanted people to think, that I'd stolen something.
When I was seventeen ...
My boyfriend Julian worked in a gay massage parlor called Selma's. For something like a hundred dollars plus tip he'd have sex with a client, the wilder or more complex the proposed activity, the bigger Julian's tip. Being eighteen, adventurous, and pretty, he raked it in. That and the money I'd steal from my parents kept us in drugs and alcohol most of that summer.
Julian had slitty brown eyes, big lips, and the tip of his nose turned up. Brown hair, shoulder length. He was slender, bony, and his skin was the color of steamed glass. He owned about three hundred different T-shirts, most of them printed with rock bands' or products' names. Jeans or cut-offs. Tennis shoes, no socks. I dressed in a similar style, but my hair's wavy, and just sort of clogs up when I grow it out. I was four inches taller than Julian, which would put him at, say, five foot eight and a half.
My only photo of Julian was shot by a client at Selma's. He's gagged and tied up in a fetal position. His ass is covered with flowery handprints. From the thighs down and rib cage up, he's very fuzzy. Still, from what you can see of his face it's obvious why someone would have paid to do something like that to him.
One night we got totally fucked up on mescaline. Too high, in fact, to go into the world. But you need stuff to do when you're that drugged, so Julian phoned this cute hippie he'd met and asked the guy to get stoned and have sex with us.
When Henry came by he was already so zonked on something we had to undress him, which made for some interesting sex, but there was a quality about him that nagged me the whole time. I kept thinking I'd met him or that he was famous or ... something. Eventually I figured it out. Henry looked spookily like the model I'd seen with his asshole blown open at Gypsy Pete's four years before. I started calculating right there, while we were eating him out, etc., how I could ask.
Then Julian accidentally dropped Henry's forehead on the edge of the coffee table. He wasn't hurt though, just confused for a second.
We'd pretty much figured him out, so when he said, "I'm not bleeding, but maybe I should split," Julian, acting as our spokesman, agreed. Henry was at the front door, negotiating the sill, when I managed to ask if he'd ever made pornos. I think Julian was in the kitchen or bathroom.
Henry stopped, wheeled around. "What do you mean by pornos?" He seemed sober all of a sudden.
"Magazines, photographs," I said. I grinned like it wasn't important whether he answered or not.
"Yeah, why?" He rested his weight on the doorframe.
I told him about the photos I'd seen of a boy with his asshole blown open.
Henry started grinning as soon as I mentioned the wound. "You saw those?" he said. "Really? I never saw those. Do you still have them, because ... ?"
I shook my head, but I don't think he was paying attention to me at that moment. He looked very dazed and excited or something.
"... Man, that's funny," he concluded.
I tried to look like I thought it was funny too. Maybe it was. "You seemed dead in them," I said.
"Oh, I used to do anything if somebody was nice to me. I was with that photographer guy for a while, and he took lots of pictures of me. I didn't know he was turning me into a business, at least not at first. Most of the shots were just me jerking off. I was stoned all the time. But those were bizarre, those dead ones."
Maybe because he was so overwrought, Henry looked different in some way-older, less sexy, but easier to be with. "Do you remember how you did it?" I asked. "I mean how you or the photographer made that wound look so real?"
"Wait," Henry said. "Describe the pictures to me because we did a bunch of different ones."
I did, very colorfully, the way I'd described the images to myself while jerking off. Spoken aloud, the descr
iptions seemed much more pretentious, ridiculous, amoral ... something, than they'd ever been in the secret, uncritical world of my fantasies. But Henry didn't care how sexily I described the idea of him dead. He just listened and nodded like I was giving him directions to the next town.
"It was makeup," he said. "And I think some dyed cotton glued on, but I'm not sure because I was lying on my stomach, and it took him hours to get the thing right. Strange man, but nice. I was probably in love with him. In fact I'm sure I was." He smiled and shook his head, one of those funnyhow-life-is shakes. "Anyway, I almost forgot. Shit. I'm going to ask you my standard question now, so get ready. Uh, if you could change one thing about the way I acted back when we were having sex, what would that be? Be honest." He grinned.
I thought for a second. "Well, I'd want you to be less stoned."
Henry shook his head. "Yeah, obviously. I mean besides that."
I couldn't think of anything. "No, I guess not."
"Oh, really? Thanks a lot. That's nice." He looked shocked. "So, uh, call me sometime," he said like he meant it, but I guess he didn't.
"I might." I think if he'd stayed or if I'd called him, maybe he could have answered some questions about those images that went on to completely direct or destroy my life in a way. That's what I've realized now. At the time I just waited for him to take off. Once he had, Julian and I compared notes.
When I was eighteen ...
Julian moved to France with an older man he met at Selma's. Occasionally I'd get a postcard. Even before the move I'd started spending time with Julian's kid brother, Kevin, a devastatingly cute twelve-year-old with psychological problems. Julian had always kept a lot of distance from him for that reason.
Physically he was a Julian replica, only shorter, and sort of too pretty. He had this violent effect on me, something like comic book characters probably have on stoned kids. I'd fantasized drawing him into our sex life, despite his size and behavior, because he was outwardly perfect.
One day I'd hitchhiked over to visit Julian, as per routine. Kevin had answered the door. He said Julian was out. I asked what he, meaning Kevin, was up to. Nothing, he said, and led me dutifully up to his room.
The room was weird, almost empty apart from a bed and an overstuffed bookcase. I remember I asked about that. He said it was so he could redecorate in his head. That first day, for instance, he said the room had been a submarine stuck on the floor of the ocean, at least until I showed up. We talked about that and other stuff until Julian arrived a few hours later, drunk and rich.
After Julian moved away, I'd visit Kevin. We'd do drugs and talk, usually about Julian, whom Kevin admired to the point of psychosis, I thought, until one day I realized his love was more than familial. I tried to pin Kevin down. He eventually confessed to being "in love" with his brother, but claimed nothing had "happened" between them. To me the idea of them being in love was erotic. So I kept steering our repartee back to his Julian fantasies, which were incredibly sketchy as I recall.
One day Kevin's mom called me up to say how happy she was about my friendship with Kevin, whom she'd "written off" after Julian left. He seemed more stable since knowing me, she said. In fact he'd told her he loved me as much as he'd ever loved Julian, which she thought was kind of sweet, I guess.
I drove right over. When he answered the door I said I wanted to fuck him. He hugged me all the way up the staircase, down the hall, into his room. I kicked the door shut, and kind of shoved him against it. His throat made a sound I'd never heard before. It was high-pitched, loud. At the same time his legs buckled. I saw the pre-collapse tremors, threw my arms around his waist, and just managed to hold him upright by the seat of his jeans. I walked him to the bed, dropped his body across it. He wouldn't let go of my shirt and tore a huge hole.
Technically, he was a know-nothing. He kept toppling or being knocked off the bed, scratching his elbows, knees, bruising things, spraining his arms, back, etc. After a month he got so much less attractive I had to imagine I'd just rescued him from a rapist, or was raping him myself, to get involved in the sex. He never knew, though.
If I had to describe Kevin using one word I'd say hysterical. It seemed to have something to do with insecurity, but he kept freaking out all the time, even after I spent hours trying to convince him I loved him, which I'd started to do, according to my loose, personal definition of that word.
Still, it's weird how removed I became from those problems. I mean, I've gotten totally removed from almost everyone now, as far as I can tell, but with him I surprised myself because I was still just a typical person at that point, I think. Being cold was the only way I could deflect all his ... emotion, whatever. I'm repeating myself.
When I was twenty-four ...
I wore black, cut my hair, dyed it black, took a lot of amphetamines, and renamed myself Spit. My second home was a punk club called Flintstones, housed in the shell of a pizza joint Julian and I had occasionally haunted. I went there on the weekends to look for somebody to love. That was a very unpunk thing to think about, but people did. I just acted on it.
I found Samson swaying around on the dance floor, separated from me by some pogo-ing kids. He was thin, tallish, big boned, with a perky Scandinavian face a little muddied by freckles and zits. His hair was dyed blue-black and stiffened with gel into twelve-inch-long strands, most of which were bunched up on the top of his head like a scorched bouquet.
When I met his eyes and imitated their unfocused stare he seemed to recognize something and stumbled in my direction.
He had an apartment nearby, one huge single room with seven double beds scattered around "for friends." The floor was an inch deep in handbills, underwear, T-shirts ... He stood in the middle and yanked off his shirt. I flopped on a random bed. His chest was a little too narrow and pockmarked. It was all information to me.
He unsnapped his jeans and pushed them halfway down the shaft of his cock before he stopped, grinned at it, then at me.
"When you only see this part," he slurred, pointing at the visible part of his cock, "you figure what's next is total godhead, right, Spit? But when you see what you get. . ." And he yanked down the jeans. They slid as far as his knees. "It's so ugly, the whole thing." He picked up the trio and shook them roughly. "Especially the cock." He held it up. "Ug-ly."
I told him something like, Hey, it's exactly the ugliness or whatever that makes cocks paradoxical and invaluable, blah blah blah, especially on really cute boys like himself. I said it suggested depth, poetry, seriousness ... I could be really pretentious back then.
He made a face like he didn't know what I was talking about, though he later confessed that the word "cute" is what helped him waddle toward me, jeans inching down his calves.
I grabbed his ass, pulled him close, sucked his cock, licked his balls, etc., while in the blurry upper edge of my vision his head wobbled and drooled like a surrealistic cloud.
Let's see ... It was weeks later. I'd started to drift off a lot during sex, which Samson didn't particularly notice. In reality I was caressing him. In my head I'd be grabbing objects off the night table, crushing his skull, then mutilating his body, especially his ass, while he tried to dissuade me from murdering him in a brain-damaged voice.
I used to worry that ideas like those would show up on my face, but it's too crude to register anything wilder than "I'm feeling happy" or "sad" or "pissed off" or "horny" or "scared."
One night I got Samson so loaded he walked like the carpet was quicksand or something. He couldn't speak, I don't think. I aimed him at the bed, where he fell. I knelt over his chest and gazed down at his face until it blurred. Then I punched it. Again. I sort of lost my way, I can't remember exactly. Things were breaking. Sometimes I'd catch one of Samson's eyes studying me, which I guess was a muscle reflex.
I should include some reaction shots here, I know, but I doubt I had many. I felt numb, blank, so my face probably followed suit. When the incident's over, long over, I'll try to sort out the boy and myself fr
om the violence and feel anything. I'm not at that point yet.
For weeks afterward I expected police to show up at my apartment. When they didn't, I figured Samson was still alive but too mentally ruined to name names, or else his body was still sprawled there, rotting away, and nobody had missed him enough to check in.
One night I was drinking at Flintstones. The decor of that club was extravagant, a pseudo-cave with lifelike plaster stalactites and puddles of fake stagnant water. I was admiring it for the millionth time when I saw Samson pogo-ing a few yards away. There were still some bruises and cuts on his face, but since punks wore their physical damage like fashion accessories, he didn't particularly stand out.
I tried to disappear, but on my way to the exit our eyes accidentally met. I nodded, not knowing what else to do. He stopped dancing, held up one finger, as if to say, "Wait," then went back to his pogo-ing. First I froze. Then I moved out of the traffic flow and watched him gyrate. He didn't look angry. If anything, he seemed happier or something. Maybe I just saw him more sharply than before, since beauty wasn't distracting me. Or maybe I'd damaged some nerves, and his face had fewer directions to go in.
When the song ended, he strolled over. "God, Spit, the last time I saw you was so fucking strange." He grinned crookedly. "I was so out of it. And you were so weird."
Frisk: A Novel (Cooper, Dennis) Page 3