“Who?” The cop demanded, but in a boring, annoying, nonsexual way. Why couldn’t Clown Daddy be my interrogator?
“It was one of those throwaway names.”
“What was it?”
“Bob.”
“Goddammit! Bob who?”
“Bob1 at aol-dot-com.”
Whack! And he backhanded me across the face.
They threatened me with a stiff sentence if I didn’t give them something. I only considered that their sentence could never be as stiff as Clown Daddy’s meaty member, so I was unimpressed by their threats.
They gave me five years.
Clown Daddy did not appear in my cellblock, though I looked and waited and pined. It had been explained in my trial that the videos found in my home had been coded with a tracking device, leading the authorities to my house. Not unlike an ankle bracelet such as Clown Daddy wore. It had even been suggested that Clown Daddy was a narc, or had used me as a patsy. The judge put a stop to those conjectures, admonishing the defense: “Whoever gave him the pornography is not on trial today. Another day. Right now, we’re trying this man.” And he pointed at me like Clown Daddy’s member used to do.
Clown Daddy never appeared. Only Vernon. He was my cell-mate, and, as a skinny white fag, he informed me I’d be wise to do his bidding. I’ve done it, though he lacks both Clown Daddy’s girth and length, not to mention all the other characteristics that gods wield over man.
Ah, but the gods are kind for they have blest us with imagination. And so when Vernon slicks his member with Crisco I steal from the commissary and mercilessly impales me, I close my eyes and see a circus tent, and the circus music begins, and all the clowns drop their baggy pants, and then the tigers and lions turn, lifting their tails, and the dwarves and ape men offer up their tight behinds, hands firmly gripped to their ankles—and the crowd cheers, and then goes AAAHHH as Clown Daddy in all his naked huge-dicked grinning Josh Hartnett-throated glory comes swinging through on the trapeze spraying his jism all over the clowns and animals, dwarves and freaks, and the whole damn crowd, who bathe in it as in the blessed waters of Lourdes.
And Vernon is proud. He thinks he’s made that mess all over my chest and belly. Let him think it. The truth is hardly important at this point. I’m an innocent man doing time for kiddie porn, the police are fools, Vernon’s a chump, and my asshole’s just a 7-Eleven that he holds up every Saturday night. As for the cash, I hand it right over. In fact, I leave the register open. No way to run a business. But I, unlike Vernon, am not proud. For I have seen God.
I spend all my time with him. Vernon that is, not God. We even eat pancakes together. I stuff my face. I’m fattening up for Clown Daddy, while Vernon goes on and on with his theories.
“The earth is a plate,” he tells me. “Mankind sat down and is eating. When he’s through, it’ll be over.”
“Where are we now?” I ask, bored.
“Somewhere deep in the mashed potatoes; maybe halfway through.”
“Are you gay, Vernon?” I like to get a rise out of him.
“Not at all,” he explains. He tells me men are pigs, and this is why you can’t call him a faggot. Vernon says if it were legal most men he knew (and he knew a certain kind, though he always meant every man) would fuck everything in sight, and what’s more, they’d never let their sex partners survive to betray them (as they always will, by his reckoning—something to remember when I get out of here). Therefore, he’s of the opinion that men “would drill holes in their sex partner’s skulls if they could, and fuck their brains out. They’d drill holes in backs and arms, thighs, through the bottom of feet, right through the front of ’em, core the motherfuckers like apples,” he says drolly, “leave them like the dough after all the cookies have been cut out of it. But the screaming would be annoying, so you’d do the brain first.”
“Do you like the circus, Vernon?”
He shrugs his shoulders. “I don’t like those clowns. Creepy.”
“I knew a clown once.”
“Shut up and eat.”
I pour more syrup on my pancakes and watch it vanish, watch it run away and join the circus.
ORANGE
Lee Houck
Step one: Pick a moment in your life. Press your finger down onto it, holding it like you would the first loop in a square knot. Step two: Find a moment that represents where you are now, something separate, current and different, and touch another finger to that, too. Step three: Measure the distance from one to the other—in lovers lost, furniture stolen from street corners, estimated electric bills paid, early morning phone solicitations, car accidents you witnessed. Band-Aids on fingers. Step four: Figure out how the hell you got here now from where you were then.
Sometimes the first moment I choose is my cheesy orange fingertips in the propped-open back end of a station wagon parked on the tire-tracked sand of a crowded Florida beach. I must have been three years old. I don’t remember it, but I have seen the photograph of me sitting there—blue and yellow tub of Cheese Balls between my diapered legs, hand stuck inside. Blond hair, just like now. When you look at pictures of yourself doing things that you don’t remember, the image freezes and becomes part of your history, even though it seems invented. A memory that forms who you are without you knowing it. Like genes, unconscious but familiar.
Sometimes the moment is foamy orange Circus Peanuts melting on the dashboard of a pickup truck. We were driving there without any place to be, or any place in mind to end up in. He bought a Mountain Dew because it was my favorite. I should tell you about the way his hands moved when he talked. The way words seemed to burst out of his fingers. The urgency, the way he made even garbage seem like quantum physics. But it all gets screwed around in my brain. Memory serves only to fuck things up. And photographs can lie to you, because if you have a picture of someone, and he goes away, dies or disappears, the photo becomes the only thing you remember about him.
How did this start?
Shredded carrots at a salad bar, on some school trip in a shopping mall?
A completely mediocre, but still your favorite, orange-tinted album cover?
The smooth spine of an unread paperback book?
Other times, like this time right now, right here in this guy’s bedroom, it’s greasy orange cleanup wipes, the kind that he rubbed up and down his arms before climbing up behind me. “Do you like to get fucked?” he says.
A giant of a man, six foot plus something. Huge, but not alien-looking, still handsome, still attractive. A tiny line of mustache. He’s bulky like a sack of flour, his body dense, smooth like rising dough. Forearms thick as a coffee can, covered in what I guess is car grease or engine grime, a shiny ultraviolet glimmer. Smells like steel. Skin brown underneath.
His lips are drawn on so beautifully that I can’t help but look right into his mouth when he’s talking, and not into his eyes. He kisses my hand.
He’s holding a white plastic tub. Tearing off the lid, he pulls out a strip of creamy orange-colored cheesecloth. A powerful knock-your-ass-on-the-floor kind of scent. The most fake, plastic, outer space, movie-smelling orange. Good though. The orange-powered grease cutter is pasted into the spaces of the cheesecloth. He rubs his hands, detailing the knuckles, the cuticles. And the smell of it hangs around through the entire act. Through the rough fingers, unclipped nails tugging at my warm knot of skin, before he’s climbing up behind me.
Once again, I end up on my stomach. And I realize that when he reaches his arm around my face, around my neck, and grabs on to my shoulder with his hand—starting to really fuck me hard—that I’d better get fucking control of myself. I start to flatten out. In my head, I mean. I start finding that preaware, rocklike place where I can concentrate. I go to the place where everything is flat. I’m inhaling, looking for that sugary ashy smell, and suddenly, uncontrollably, my brain begins its hyper-journey back to twelve years old. Memories hijack my neurons. Memories of taste, of touch, of fake orange, and when I place my mouth on this guy’s arm,
it all becomes clear. I’m no longer in this place, in this bedroom. My head, my brain, myself, it’s all somewhere entirely different.
We’re pushing our bikes up this giant hill, and the bugs are swarming around our heads. Hot Southern summer, with salty beads of sweat around our brows and upper lips. Slapping our necks with our dusty hands, smashing black gnats. Sometimes one will fly into your mouth. But we don’t care when they do. And when we get to the top of the hill we find a beat-up old cassette tape, cracked open and spilling its threads of sound onto the pavement. And we unwind the tape, a huge, hundred-foot string. And we snap it in half at the middle, tying the pieces onto the seats of our bikes, and ride back down the hill, watching the glittering of who knows what on cassette flowing behind us like a tail, like a stretched-out wish, like a thin brown destiny.
We’re driving a beat-up white car through a rainstorm at three o’clock in the morning in the middle of Mississippi—or maybe we’d made it to Alabama without seeing the sign, or maybe we were still in Louisiana. And the rain is coming down so hard that we can’t see the street in front of us. And we’re both thinking tornado warning for upper and lower Alabama, but we don’t say it out loud. So for three hours we travel what adds up to be forty-two miles on the low-shoulder freeway. We pass a few cars parked on the side, determined to wait it out. And in those three hours; the loud, wind-shaken hours; we don’t speak. I squint, my eyes low along the top of the dash, and he drives, tapping the gas pedal, not braking, easing on, rolling back toward home. Then, crossing the state line, we see the brightness of the morning. I look over at him, he stares ahead.
And when he loosens his grip around my neck, around my head, when my mouth breaks free from the inside of his elbow, the awfulness of the present returns. This guy, this orange-smelling grease monkey, barks in my ear about how he wants to tie me up. Haven’t I heard all this before? You would think it was tattooed across my forehead: TIE ME UP, TIE ME UP!
He knots my hands to the bed frame, rope made of something natural, cotton I think. Blocks my legs apart with a short two-by-four. So I’m spread-eagle on this bed, on my stomach, of course, and the knots rub raw places into my wrists. And I know that if I didn’t tug so much on the rope, then it wouldn’t rub so much. But he asks me to struggle a little, and I don’t know how much is a little. So I do it until he starts going, “Yeah, yeah.”
We used to take drives out to nowhere on weeknights. He’d smoke and we’d put a mix tape on and take turns talking. About what we wanted to do when we grew up, even though we were sixteen and didn’t know what we wanted to do when we grew up. And didn’t really care. And what we wanted to do would change every few miles, every few minutes. And we were grown up already. We’d pass rusted farm machinery, crumbling frames jutting out of the browning grass, leaping out of the dirt. Out near the deserted factory that you’d ride past if you went far enough. He’d take pictures of me in front of it. He wouldn’t let me take pictures of him, he said he didn’t like having his picture taken. I wouldn’t smile because I knew what we were doing was serious. And he knew it was serious. And so he didn’t ask me to smile. We didn’t have to pretend. It was too hard to pretend. And mostly it still is.
We were fifteen and hiking up the part of the trail that was marked DO NOT ENTER.Because the best parts of the mountain were marked DO NOT ENTOR. We’d stand at the tip of the rock, where the trail went shooting straight out into the air, over the waterfall, the canopy. The place where red-tailed hawks spiraled in circles, heavy wings lifted by the fast and beautiful air. The place where he put his arm on my shoulder. And we stood quiet. I could hear the thumping of my heartbeat in my ears, in my chest, in the tingling pulsing pressure of my fingertips. Some nights we slept outside in heavy nylon sacks, drowning in the half-light of the moon. Some nights we climbed trees, or burned pine-needle shapes in the road. Picked blueberries and ate them in the dark.
And I see him pull open the bedside table drawer, noticing the grease mark he missed on the back of his elbow. The orange air is thick and clammy around my head, stuck inside my nose, taking my olfactory canals hostage. He opens the drawer, rustles through the dog-eared TV Guide, the (what is that, a compact?) the Q-Tips and wadded up tissues. He pulls out a syringe. And the needle goes down into the side of my arm, a warm yellow energy flushing out my veins. If pain and happiness were mixed together and held in liquid suspension, that’d be almost what it felt like. And here’s where everything comes slamming back into me, tearing open the little fear pockets in my head. I jerk hard on my wrists and there’s nothing. No response. Like waking up too fast and you fall down. Only here the falling feels so fucking good. All of a sudden, falling without impact. So I slam my face back into the pillow, like a fool trying to reenter a dream. Saying softly to myself “Come on, come on, come on.”
And he pushes the needle (a different needle?) down into my arm again.
And like two trains colliding, all 142 passengers are presumed dead or buried alive in the wreckage, I’m on my stomach and the arm wrapped around my face tastes like a gritty lemon paste, smells like orange bubble gum, like Circus Peanuts. Light breaks open in my brain and shines on the back of my eyes, exposing broken vessels, tired retinas. Shock therapy in my arteries, buzzing like a blank radio and numb like a sleeping foot. I’m stuck here, roped and blocked with his fingers up my ass. No, wait, did I tell the fucking part already? How did I start this story?
Late at night, I drive out to the docks and stare out into the lake. And it feels like I’m drifting out, away from the shore, away from everything. I lie on my back, settle down in one of the concave places, rub my fingers against the wood. And the night gets so dark that I can’t see anything. Even my hands, inches from my face.
And then I start falling asleep, but it feels different than this in-and-out stuff. I feel my body letting go. Uncontrolled, unconscious, uncomfortable. And no matter how hard I try, no matter how much I tug and grunt at the stupid ropes, I know that I’m about to go under.
And this beautiful creature with the tiny mustache, orange-scented forearms and perfectly drawn lips breaks open another bottle of clear something and stuffs the needle down into it. “Want another one?” he says.
I roll my head back, willing it all away, trying to scream into the void, but nothing comes out. All the hairs on my neck bolt upright, there’s a continuous crackling of dendrites in my brain. I try to jerk away, and then—
Quiet.
I come out of it, shaken and unsure. The borders of the room materialize again, walls and windows and doors. And this grease monkey climbing up on top of me. And the hand is gone, the air sealed again, impermeable, like a see-through plastic surface.
And once more, the blazing white light of the needle going down into my skin.
My arms go limp, the rope slacks.
My eyelids atrophy, fail.
FUCKING DOSEONE
Ralowe Trinitrotoluene Ampu
For Dax Pierson, my sexy one-time assigned processing correspondent
Doseone said something really weird and homophobic at an Anticon show when he was freestyling. It was at 26 Mix. It made me really angry. I keep talking about it. I get so emotional. As a rapper, I feel like I need to create my own history: points in a time line of some personal significance, the way De La Soul tried to manufacture a consumer history on Stakes Is High by opening the album with the question, Where were you when you first heard “Criminal Minded”? I went to this fateful Anticon show around when I first started rapping seriously, and Dose was one of the first real rappers I’d ever met. I ran into him at Amoeba Records on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. I suppose he still works there. I was browsing when I saw him out of the corner of my eye. White boy. White T-shirt. Glasses.
I grew up in Ventura, in an all-white suburb of Southern California, a sprawling, desolate expanse of tract homes. I lived there for twenty-one years and it made me really angry. Telegraph Avenue near the UC Berkeley campus reminds me of Ventura. And Dose reminds me of the w
hite boys across the street who used to call me nigger. They were the first kids I made friends with.
I’m wandering around Telegraph when I start writing about desire, or maybe childhood. I see a group of young, pouty white boys fully nigga’ed-out in saggy sweat suits and I imagine their dicks in my mouth as they cast shady glances at me, just barely giving me enough sidewalk. There are also mall boys, with asymmetrical rocker hair, wearing Leon Neon bracelets and sports coats, angel blue eyes wracked with pain. Looks like they’ve just gotten dropped off by their parents. There’s a feeling of a constant sea of frustrated desire. My pornographic imagination is utterly overloaded by the ebb and flow to and from the Berkeley campus.
Dose was superfriendly. My hand was hovering above MF Doom, and Dose came over and was all, like, “That’s a good album,” then produced another from a row of CDs. “This is, too.” Then, “Actually, this is my album. Hi, I’m Adam.” When I realized I had seen Doseone perform before at Rico’s in downtown San Francisco, I said, “Your stuff sounds like Solesides,” and Dose said, “Lyrics Born was one of the first rappers that opened up to me.” I told her I was in Deep Dickollective, a black gay rap group, and I gave her my group’s URL, and she gave me her email at Dirtyloop. I ended up at Amoeba the next day because my friend Lyndon wanted to shop for CDs and I ran into Dose again. I was, like, “Hmm, you work a lot.” She asked me again what I meant about being in a gay rap group. The concept seemed to evade her. Doseone had listened to a D/DC EP, and was perplexed by our apparent homophobia, demanding to know, “Are you gay?” and I said for the third time, “Yes.” I didn’t realize that Dose might be indicating an insight into the fallacy of D/DC’s hypermasculine performance; I was also caught up in it.
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