Merciless Gods

by Christos Tsiolkas

  Mickey asked if I could come in on the shoot. He wanted me to make some money too. The director looked across to Dick Cheese Saunders, who shook his head. ‘The kid’s fucking cross-eyed!’

  I looked down at the floor, humiliated, and then I went spastic, wanting to knife the cunt, but then I remembered what Alex, who was my sponsor at the Congregation, had taught me. He taught me that when I get pissed off, I should just pray, instead of losing it. So I started to pray and the director bloke came over and lifted my chin.

  He smiled and asked me in that strange accent of his if I could open my mouth. ‘More, open more wide,’ he ordered me and I stretched it open so much it began to hurt. He checked my teeth, checked my profile, left and right, got me to take off my T-shirt, show him my dick, to bend over and stretch open my arse. He was like a doctor. ‘Is okay,’ he said finally, ‘we can use.’

  Mickey winked at me.

  But Dick Cheese Saunders still said no. Then his tone softened. He said something about the next time. He offered me something to get me high, an E crushed into a powder, and asked me to stay out of the way and be quiet. So I sat in a corner and got high and kept quiet.

  A scrawny red-haired kid came rushing in. He had zits all over his chin and he was obviously speeding off his nut. Dick Cheese Saunders introduced him to Mickey but no one bothered about me.

  It took ages and ages to set up, I smoked five cigarettes before it even started, and Mickey came over to sit with me. Saunders wouldn’t hand over the baggy till the shoot was finished, cos he was scared Mickey wouldn’t be able to get it up if he was high, so Mickey snorted some of the E instead.

  Then they were ready. A white sheet had been pinned against a wall and some crates were piled in front of it. Mickey and the red-haired kid were sitting on the crates kissing, which I knew Mickey didn’t want to do, but he seemed to be getting into it, which caused a tingling sensation in my stomach which I knew was jealousy. They had to keep stopping and starting, something to do with the cameras.

  When Mickey stripped to his underwear, the director couldn’t help himself. ‘Fuck,’ he called out in admiration, pronouncing it furrk. ‘Fuck!’

  Mickey is so fucking beautiful. Mickey makes the whole world go Fuck!

  Mickey says his mum is from the bush and his dad was from a place overseas called Caracas, which I’d never heard of but which always makes me laugh when he says it. Carac-ass. His dad was in South Australia one year picking fruit and fucked Mickey’s mum under a full moon. She got pregnant. She wanted to get pregnant to him, even though she was only sixteen, even though he was a stranger, a backpacker travelling through, because he was dark and handsome and she thought that with his genes and her Irish blood they would create a beautiful baby. And she was right. Mickey has a photo of his brother and his sister, and they’re alright, good-looking enough, but both their dads are strictly Aussie and the kids are nothing like Mickey. They don’t make your stomach crunch up like he does.

  At the Congregation—it’s not a church, they don’t call it a church—they give you free coffee and sandwiches and you can crash there for the night. It used to be a movie theatre, back in the old, old days, and I like falling asleep in the ticket box, curled up in there. The place is always full of ferals and punks and whores and druggies, and then there are the old men and women who stink of their own shit, and everyone is snoring and cursing, but sometimes they are praying and sometimes we all pray together. That’s the best, when we are all praying and then I can get to sleep because I know I’ll be safe, that Jesus is in the old picture house with me.

  Sometimes Alex is there. He always seeks me out. And always takes me out and buys me a feed. He asks how I’m doing, where I’m sleeping, how I’m getting my money, and even when I tell him I’m doing fine, that Mickey’s looking out for me, tears will always well up in his eyes and that makes me feel crap, like I done something to him, and I have to look away. Alex is twenty-six but he doesn’t look that old and he has a job and rents a house and is a normal civilian. Mickey, who never goes to the Congregation, who says he can’t stand their holy God-bothering bullshit, reckons Alex is like any other mug, that he just wants to fuck me. I tell Mickey he’s wrong, but he won’t believe me. Alex isn’t like that, he’s not evil. I’m the evil one. I wish Alex would take me home, that he would fuck me. I wish I could live with him forever.

  I drift back into the warehouse. Even without the scag, Mickey was taking ages getting hard and the director was starting to get pissed off. The red-haired kid was on his knees sucking Mickey off and from time to time he’d drop Mickey’s cock out of his mouth and shrug at the men filming.

  ‘Nothing’s happening,’ he complained, sounding bored, like he wished it was all over.

  The director was getting wilder and wilder, screaming out instructions, some in English, some not, and the room was boiling with all the lights like it was a sauna. The director called Mickey a useless junkie whore and I could tell Mickey was about to lose it.

  So from the corner of the room, the lights so bright that they seemed as big as the sun—it was a really trippy E—I yelled out, ‘Close your eyes, Mickey!’

  Dick Cheese Saunders turned around at me and then he started yelling, telling me to fucking shut my mouth or I’d be thrown out.

  I said, really scared, ‘But he’s got to close his eyes and think of girls, otherwise he can’t get it up.’

  At that, Dick Cheese Saunders just started running towards me, like some wild animal in a television documentary, and it looked slow motion except for his voice, which was screaming, Didn’t I tell you to shut it, didn’t I tell you to say nothing, you ugly cross-eyed cunt, and when he reached me his boot flew up and kicked me right in the gut. My head hit the wall, and I hated myself for it but I started crying. I saw Mickey tense up but he and the others did nothing. There was nothing anyone could do. There was no one who could beat Dick Cheese Saunders in a fight. He bent down, grabbed my hair. ‘Not a word, right, not one fucking word.’ Then he turned and walked back. I wiped his spit and my tears off my face.

  Later, in our flat, watching The X-Files, Mickey told me what I said wrong. ‘Poofters don’t want to hear that straight guys have to think of girls to get off. They want to believe that straight guys can get off on faggot sex.’

  ‘But I was right. Once you closed your eyes, you were fine.’

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘You were right, but you shouldn’t have said it in front of Saunders. I’m not angry, I’m just trying to explain why the fag got mad at you.’ He stood over me. ‘I’m leaving tomorrow, I won’t be around to look after you. Don’t forget any of what I taught you.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  He slapped me playfully on the back of the head and smiled.

  I will not get into a car without first chalking the rego on a street pole.

  I will ring Mum at Christmas and on her birthday.

  I will not allow mugs to fuck me up the arse without a condom and I’ll keep my eyes shut real tight when they come on my face.

  I won’t jack up heroin on my own.

  I will go back to school one day.

  And one day, I will move away from here. Like Angie going up to Cairns or Mickey going to Adelaide. He got me to promise that one day I would move away, to somewhere smaller, further away from the world. Sydney, he always says to me, is a city of dead souls.

  Mickey knows I am in love with him and he says he doesn’t mind. In fact, he jokes that he’s honoured. He’s the second guy I’ve been in love with. The first was my father’s friend Roman, who was a big loud Polish guy who lived in the same street we grew up in. Roman had been married and had two kids but he had murdered his wife when their youngest kid was still a baby. His wife had been fucking someone else. He had been locked away for thirteen years. He lived across the street from us and only Dad and my mum would talk to him. He was fifty-five when we got together. Dad would chuck me out of the house every second day, for giving lip, or refusing to speak Greek to my gia
gia, or just because he had drunk too much, and I’d go across to Roman’s house. At first we just watched TV together and then we started watching it in his bedroom. Then one day he kissed me and jerked me off. I wanted him to do other things to me but he said no, that it wasn’t right. Then when I was thirteen I got pubes and he told me that it was not a problem now, if I wanted to, it was alright for him to fuck me. We did, for two years, until I busted my giagia’s jaw and kicked my dad almost to death and had to run. From home, from Melbourne. I knew I had to run as far away as I could. So I ran to Sydney.

  It was Roman who taught me about Jesus. Above his bed he had a huge picture of Jesus holding a bleeding heart. In the picture Jesus was crying. If the room was dark, the bleeding heart glowed orange, and Jesus’s eyes would shimmer. I’d fall asleep looking at His eyes. Roman taught me the Lord’s Prayer and told me how if I prayed and looked down at the ground, Jesus would listen to me.

  Roman told me how back in his village one day the Germans had come to take all the boys and men, and he had looked down at the ground and prayed, and the Germans completely overlooked him. He said he heard the Virgin speak to him, tell him, ‘Shh, it will all be fine. You will go live and travel far away and you will find a beautiful wife but she will betray you and you will suffer but I will never leave you.’ Roman would sometimes cry when he told me this; he would tell me how lovely his wife had been. But there were no pictures of her in the house and the pictures of his children were all hidden from me. He wouldn’t tell me their names because what he and I did was wrong and shameful and he didn’t want someone like me to know who they were because he said people who had fallen under the sway of Satan were granted evil powers while they were on earth. He said that I could make someone die by just wishing it. But I had to have a vision of them in my mind before I could curse them. That was why I was going to burn in hell for eternity.

  That’s wrong, Alex says. Jesus forgives all sins. That’s the promise. Jesus is not going to cast me into the fires of hell, even though I am a sinner and a junkie and a pervert, because he loves me, and when I am reborn in heaven I will not feel the urge to sin anymore. I will be as one with the angels.

  Like Mickey. He’s an angel already and that’s why Jesus is inside him.

  Mickey had to fuck the redhead. The room was so damn hot that his body was all wet with his sweat. They kept having to stop the shoot and wipe him down, his face and arse and shoulders. It was really slow and made me think being an actor would be boring. With all the stopping and starting, Mickey was taking ages to come and the redhead started whinging that he was getting sore. Dick Cheese Saunders made a sudden move and the kid shut up immediately.

  I was watching the ceiling turn blue and grey, then green and pink. I was so warm in the light that I fell asleep.

  Mickey woke me, and asked me if I wanted a bite to eat. He had his clothes back on. Dick Cheese Saunders gave us ten bucks and we went outside and my body expanded. I could breathe clean air again.

  I walked behind Mickey, who was shivering a little from the chill.

  ‘Is it finished?’

  ‘Nah. I’ve got some more to do in the afternoon.’

  ‘What was it like?’

  ‘Okay. But it’s not like having sex with a mug. It’s different because the kid I’m fucking is being paid as well. Do you remember Show and Tell at school?’

  I nodded.

  ‘It’s like that. I was really nervous. Until I closed my eyes. And then I didn’t think of sex. I thought of how much I like the beaches in Adelaide and I thought of being on that bus and how happy Mum will be to see me. Then it was fine. Then I just did it.’

  ‘I wish you weren’t going.’

  He was silent. He hadn’t given me a phone number of anyone in Adelaide. I knew Mickey liked me. But I was part of what he wanted to leave behind. All the dead souls of Sydney. I wasn’t going to take it personally. He was leaving behind four million people and I happened to be one of them.

  •

  Last summer I saw the body of a young girl in Potts Point. She was sitting against a wall on Macleay Street with her head down. Everyone was walking past her. I stopped and looked more closely at her. The syringe was still clutched in one hand and her skin had turned the colour of ash. I checked that no one was around and then I touched her skin. I jumped back: it was freezing and felt like leather. Eventually one of the drag queens noticed her and called over a cop, who lifted her arm, dropped it, and called through for an ambulance.

  ‘Did you know her?’

  I said I had no idea who she was.

  ‘A scrag,’ said the drag queen and started walking away. The ambulance came and so did the nuns. They started praying and I joined in with them.

  That night I told Mickey and he must have had a hard day because he went ballistic at me, started hitting me and kicking me, called me a fucking lousy Jesus freak. ‘She’s gone to hell, you know, being a whore and a junkie and all that shit. That’s what you believe, isn’t it?’

  He kept punching me, kept hitting me; I was screaming and every part of me hurt like I was burning and then I passed out.

  In the morning I was in the bed between him and Angie, and he held me tight and kept saying sorry. ‘I didn’t mean to, I didn’t mean to.’

  Angie made me toast and taught me a little maths, which she was really good at, and afterwards I crept back into bed with Mickey.

  I told him that I didn’t believe in hell, there was only heaven. ‘That’s because Jesus loves us and he wouldn’t let there be a place worse than earth.’

  Mickey touched the corner of my eye. ‘Sorry, mate,’ he said, and his voice was way sad. ‘It’s going to bruise. I’ve given you a black eye.’

  ‘I don’t care.’

  ‘Go to sleep.’

  But I remembered that I’d touched a dead body. I went and washed my hands, just let the hot water run and run till the skin went red.

  •

  When we got back to the warehouse, Saunders and Mickey had an argument. Mickey doesn’t get fucked. It don’t matter how much the mugs offer. He just doesn’t do it. He’ll suck cock, and he’ll let the mugs lick him out down there and if they pay extra he may lick them there too but no way will he get fucked. Saunders wanted to see him get it. I realised that this was what it was all about. But Mickey said no, he wasn’t going to do it and he wasn’t going to budge. Saunders reminded him that Mickey owed him.

  ‘That’s why I’m doing this shit, you pervo cunt. I owe you nothing.’

  ‘We made a deal.’

  ‘And I’m sticking to it.’

  ‘No, you’re not.’ Dick Cheese Saunders was standing over him, jabbing his finger into Mickey’s chest.

  Mickey went to shove him away and Saunders clocked him a backhander. Thwack! It rang through the warehouse. Everyone went dead quiet.

  ‘Listen here, you maggot. You promised me that you’d do this. My exact words to you were would you make a porno for me in which you have to get fucked. Up. The. Arse. Do you remember me saying that?’

  Mickey sullenly nodded.

  ‘And what did you say in reply?’

  Mickey was silent.

  Thwack! Dick Cheese Saunders backhanded him again. I wished I could make people die with my thoughts. I’d make Saunders die a million times, in burning oil, vultures tearing at his innards, a spike up his arse to his throat. I could watch him die a million times.

  ‘What did you reply, maggot?’

  ‘I said I’d do it.’

  Dick Cheese Saunders turned to the director, all smiles. ‘Let’s start.’

  While we’d been out they had built three cubicles, fitted out to look like they were public toilets, with sleazoid graffiti all over the walls and glory holes punched in the masonite.

  A man with a thick grey moustache who had not been there before lunch was joking with the sound guy. He was wearing a checked shirt and his jeans were unzipped. He was smoking, and from time to time he would pull out his dick and tug at
it. The thing was a monster, the hugest I’d ever seen. Long, thick as a beer can, with a hideous droopy foreskin.

  The lights were switched back on and the moustache man went into the middle cubicle and started pissing. The camera guy was on his knees filming it all. The director ordered Mickey into the first cubicle and he too started pissing. Then it was the red-haired kid’s turn but he couldn’t get a stream going so they had to stop.

  When they started again the older guy’s cock was rock hard and he was getting sucked off by both Mickey and the redhead. Then the director ordered Mickey to stand up and the kid had to go down on both of them. He was finding it hard and starting to gag. Then they stopped the filming again to wipe everyone down.

  This time Mickey had to fuck the kid. There was no condom but I knew it was okay because Mickey didn’t have the disease. The kid’s face was all screwed up, he wasn’t used to getting fucked yet, and his cock had shrivelled up completely. I could see the veins straining, popping out on his neck.

  Then Mickey pulled out and the older guy started fucking the kid. As soon as he was in, the kid was screaming, ‘Stop! Stop! It fucking hurts, it fucking really hurts.’ He was crying, actually sobbing, and it made him look even younger.

  But they didn’t stop filming for a long time, by which time the kid’s sobs had stopped and he was just groaning, making gurgling, incoherent sounds, with his eyes shut and his teeth clenched.

  I didn’t want to look, I just kept staring up at beams on the ceiling, but then Dick Cheese Saunders came over to me and yanked me to my feet. He had his cock out too and grabbed my hand and made me touch it. I started jerking him off but still tried to look anywhere else but at what was happening in the middle of the room. Saunders’ breathing was both loud and slow.

  I looked over when I heard the director call out, ‘On the boy’s face, come on his face.’ Mickey blew but the director and his camera were interrupting my view and I couldn’t see it. The older guy was still fucking the red-haired kid.