His image began to quiver as moisture welled in my eyes. I felt overwhelmed and frantic, like all the oxygen had been sucked out of the air, like I was drowning in hot quicksand, like I was some tiny primordial thing sinking into the tar pits.
I closed my eyes and took a series of deep calming breaths, back to back….
“Dude!” he barked.
My eyes snapped open. I noticed the sun was shining brightly now, though rain still poured. Ray was watching me through the mirror with an expression that made my eyes burn.
“It’s fuckin’ late. The movie starts in forty-five fuckin’ minutes. Get fuckin’ dressed!”
I yanked myself off the floor, not as excited about pig guts and gore anymore, and did exactly as I was told.
FUNERAL CLOTHES
Tom Cardamone
Sung works at a little stall off Lafayette and Canal. They sell an abundance of T-shirts stuffed into a remarkably compact space; colorful stocking caps with the symbols of baseball teams hang, clothespinned to wires, from the low rippled-tin ceiling. Imperceptible until you are almost on him, a small old man sits in the tight corner, shaded beneath a broad visor, making keys behind a shelf of rolled shirts and the gold key chains of pocket-sized skylines. The visor obscures his face and, with his back to you all day, he appears to be fashioning something more than keys. Grinding away all day like that you would expect him to produce swords, something large and magnificent.
Sung, arms crossed, folds his tall body atop a stepladder in the middle of the sidewalk, ostensibly because there’s no room in the stall if even one customer enters, but also because this elevated position allows him to survey the bustle for potential shoplifters. He does this with a look of serious concentration; chain-smoking, perched like a studious chess player, he sifts for crime. Since taking the job he’s only caught two shoplifters. A fat, tearful tourist woman in a college sweatshirt tried to steal a key chain. He caught her and blocked her way while shouting for police. Fellow venders poured in as her relatives calmly videotaped the entire episode. And a black boy took a swipe at some hats. Sung leapt from his perch to collar the kid, but an unseen confederate punched him in the mouth. He wore that swollen, bloody lip proudly. When we kissed he would do so roughly, pushing open the cut against my mouth, sticky warmth leaking out between us, painting the tip of my tongue red. After his bottom lip healed he got it pierced, a silver ring that hung like a handle, a doorknob I could turn but never open.
Besides key chains and lighters, he sells a variety of jade Buddhas and fans and shiny, folded Chinese clothes.
“Only white people buy these,” he told me with a huge, knowing grin.
These were Shou-yi, funeral clothes, Sung explained. Dressing for corpses, for that prom the afterlife must surely be. Surpluses, the odd sizes, off-patterns, were sold to tourists in Chinatown, to white people, presumably as pajamas or Halloween costumes.
I come by at closing. My temp job in a midtown accounting office ends at five, so I kill time at the Strand bookstore or at Boy Bar until seven. Sung doesn’t like me to hang out while he’s working. I tell him he’s not working, he’s smoking. He answers with a smile. Our apartment is close. Saying I live in SoHo sounds grand. It’s not. Our room is half a living room divided by a sheet, fortified by a couch with a foldout bed, a white couch made beige from a variety of undefined stains merged into one dull color, like a cup of tea with milk gone cold. Our clothes have spun into piles in the corners, wrapped around empty cigarette cartons and old flyers for clubs come and gone and yellowed paper towels and crushed cans and empty beer bottles. Sung has at least one of every hat from work. They are strewn about like exhausted Christmas lights. He wears one every day all day, even while we sleep, when we fuck.
Sung fucks me with his shoulders back, his eyes shut tight, his prominent uneven front teeth pulling back his surging bottom lip, his stomach muscles stressed and sharp with crocodile folds. The grainy brown beads of his nipples are always hard. Alternating his hands behind his back and on his hips, he fucks me like he’s doing tricks on a bike. I’ve finally been able to discern his birthday from the row of digits atop his passport photograph; he’s two years older than he told me. We should start using condoms.
While he was at work I read his passport the way expatriates read foreign newspapers, looking for economic gossip from home. Facts that clarify, not straddle distances. In his passport photo he is wearing a fresh white Lacoste shirt, collar turned up. No cap. His hair is wild, not as long as it is now but definitely yearning to grow, stretching toward the edges of the photograph as if to pull the corners in, collapsing his picture in on itself. His passport photo dares shoplifters, police, the world to hit him, secretly knowing he’ll relish the blow. Blood makes for better fingerprints. Malaysian-Chinese, Sung has been here on a tourist visa well past his allotted six months; two months ago he ran out of money and had to work. He left the youth hostel and moved in with me one week after we met.
The living room has no heat. In bed we pile on top of each other for warmth, spreading our coats over an old quilt our roommates begrudgingly lent us. As we change positions in the night I am always chasing his mouth, putting my lips near his. In the morning the room is heavy with the stale cream corn sweetness of his breath.
Part of the deal to rent out the living room is I can’t use the kitchen. Since it’s winter I keep milk on the fire escape. Cereal boxes are up on the bookshelf, all other meals we eat in Chinatown. At work I steal lunch out of the break room refrigerator, or buy a couple of hotdogs off the street. Part of the deal to keep this place is no television, no stereo. Sung lives with me though part of the deal is no one can stay over.
The couple we share the apartment with are students, musicians; they’re extremely unhappy that we are in their living room, but the need to make rent doesn’t give them an option. At first I tried to be friendly, but there is something anemic about this couple. They shy away from words, even to each other; most of their communication is a series of complex nods with their chins and a lot of pointing. Worse, they’re one of those sad couples that have begun to look alike: they both have long, brittle blond hair that coats the tiny bathroom floor. Only the male’s weak goatee allows me to tell them apart. Sung hates them and, as far as I can tell, has never spoken to them. He calls them Hansel and Gretel. At first I laughed, but now I frequently forget their names, lulled into their preferred form of communication when I see them: weary waves, nods, some pointing.
After work we go straight back to the apartment. Sung fucks me, hands on his hips. When he cums he exhales the sound of a collapsing church. I can’t cum until I hear that sound, beams crashing down on me, lying across my chest. I shoot a river of frosting, pungent little wedding cake bells strung right up to my chin, and I open my eyes. Sung is looking at me, panting through an open smile, dry spittle whitening the corners of his mouth, the baroque musculature of his stomach brilliant with sweat. He looks at me the same way I examine his passport photo. Running his finger over points of departure, he smears the semen cooling on my chest in a circular pattern.
He hasn’t said anything to me and I haven’t told him I found the return ticket he purchased last week, hidden among his papers and passport; the date of departure, next Thursday, from JFK.
Snow on the roof spreads an alien topiary garden of crystal mysteries. We take the fire escape up here sometimes to smoke. In nothing but untied sneakers and cap (of course), wrapped in the dirty quilt, Sung sucks warmth from his cigarette, the cherry burning like Mars in a telescope. I took the time to dress and grab a coat. He finishes his cigarette before me and rushes down the fire escape and back through the window. I tap my ash out on the ledge, into the hole Sung made in the snow with his extinguished cigarette butt, hot ash melting snow to water, running off the roof in tiny black droplets. Part of the deal is that I not smoke in the apartment.
Tonight we’ll go for dinner a few blocks east of Bowery, above Canal, a cheap Chinese diner. Imprisoned carp list to one
side in the window aquariums, slowly blinking unfocused, molten eyes. Sung and I have a half-dozen restaurants where we can eat a full meal for five dollars or under. Afterward we have a similar number of East Village bars to drink in, but we always go to Boy Bar first. Friday nights I pick him up and we hit a check-cashing place on Elizabeth Street that has the best rates. We go to Boy Bar early to score. And here we divide. I like K, Ketamine. Sung likes coke.
It’s the typical chorus line of hunched expectancy at the bar; we grab our usual booth in the back and order drinks, waiting. Everyone is waiting. In a sad synchronized swivel, every head at the bar turns in unison as the door opens. We always take the back booth, its leather seats held together by duct tape and desperation, to avoid joining the sorry expectancy at the bar. This has earned us a certain amount of favoritism from our dealer, Lonnie. Lonnie’s going for a typical Lower East Side hipster look: rumpled, earth-toned clothes, faux-fallen rock star chic. He’s always unshaven, a limp cigarette at the corner of his mouth, and though young his cheeks are jowly from constant drinking. The lines of his neck look dark, as if filled with dirt. He always wears a black knit cap low, right to his eyebrows. Often his eyes are secreted behind cheap, mirrored aviator glasses, the lens marred by huge, blurry fingerprints. He’ll slide smoothly into our booth, waving over a drink, tipping the bartenders with a handshake laden with slim baggies of coke. This pays for his drinks and his right to do business here. We score over small talk. He treats us like friends, using our names way too often, in an unusually high voice. It’s a forced, crackly casualness that over time has become authentic: the weight of paranoia that comes with his profession, subsumed by the sing-song breeziness he’s adopted to counteract nuanced fear.
He likes Sung more than me. He sits next to me so he can look at Sung while he talks to us. Everyone likes Sung. He greets everyone by nodding his head and smiling. It’s such a simplistic act of immediate approval I’m surprised it works so succinctly, so consistently. And his smile. His uneven teeth the opposite of ugly, Sung’s smile is a roller coaster, a carnival billboard inviting everyone in for a good time. It gets free coke out of Lonnie. Or at least he’ll front a bag or two before payday. After handshakes exchanging twenties and drugs, Lonnie takes his place in the bathroom, his roost between two sour urinals. The bar’s patrons shuffle to the back, one after another, to score. He’ll hang out in the bathroom for two hours, then leave. On the way out he always slaps me on the back. Passing the table he points his finger like a gun at Sung and makes like he’s shooting him. Sung always laughs, grabs his chest and falls back into his seat. By now Sung has been able to do two or three bumps of coke off his wrist, so it’s quite natural for him to show off the insane delight that is his smile.
I’ve done an equal number of rounds of Ketamine off my wrist, but where coke draws Sung’s lips over his teeth and animates his eyes, K lures me inward.
Here kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty.
I love this drug.
I’ll forget I’ve lit a cigarette and light another. Laughing, Sung will smoke my other cigarette without comment. Worse, I’ll forget I’ve done a bump and do another. Forgetting that one, I’ll do another. Once I went to the bathroom and forgot to come out. It was just so nice in there. Of course Sung didn’t notice I was missing until he went to the bathroom to piss, and there I was, crouched on the wet floor, rolling a slimy, pisssoaked mothball I’d retrieved from one of the urinals between my fingers. Smiling away, I’m sure.
I didn’t move here to erase myself. However, once K’s smoky, marshmallow fungus began to converge on my memories, snuffing them out, I surrendered. It was like falling into a boiling parachute, the tentacles of its shredded tethers reaching out to pull me in.
I started smoking Marlboro Lights not because Sung did, but because I like the look of their cool stem, the gray-white smoke, new ingredients for my saltless soul.
This city is a picnic for sleepwalkers; everyone is together but completely separated, imprisoned in the library of his own particular dreamworld. This is a language of memory, one of images and places stitched together with bloody thread, thread stolen from the corpses of soldiers filling trenches with brown blood, so that your bedroom leads to your kindergarten class; the classroom’s window looks out on an ocean of burning questions. No wonder the thread that bridges these incomparable places smells like kerosene. Or mothballs.
I need this drug.
I miss reading, though. I just can’t seem to concentrate anymore. I’ll sit on the train, a thick tome swiped from the Strand on my lap. The words make perfect sense, I mean, I get it. But I don’t get very far. Fading away, I stare at the people on the train, weeding them until I only see the Asian boys, wishing earnestly the cute ones would stare back. And sometimes they do.
I used to have a ton of books at the apartment. They were a beer-rippled bridge to the past, proof I had gone to college: literary biographies, lives on paper about lives on paper. Pages that faded to white on the train. One day I came home from work and all of my books were gone. It was two days before payday and Sung had sold them so we would have money for dinner.
Another bump.
Sung does one, too.
I can tell from the way he’s grinding his teeth that the coke has settled in the back of his throat, erosive and grainy. He gets up to get another drink. No. We’re at another bar. Not sure I recognize this place. Everyone a frozen neon blur, and the music has really long pauses, like valleys, dark Columbian jungles gripping crashed planes, vine-wrapped skulls knocking against each other in the breeze, providing impetus for a renewal of beats. The song returns. I blink and everyone speeds up to normal. Sung returns with two drinks. Sliding one to me he asks, “You all right?”
I nod and wag the cigarette between my lips at him. He smiles and gives me a light. Smoking the last of a butt from the ashtray (another cigarette I abandoned?), he looks through the cloudy remnants, past me; I know he’s gauging his internal clock. Time for another bump? He’s trying to hold out for as long as possible, make the bag last all night. To fuck with him I do another huge bump, snorting it loudly, flagrantly, off my wrist. He only laughs and nods; cutting a presumptuous line on the table, he snorts blow through a rolled-up bill. I can’t make out the denomination, though the dandruff-flaked president does wink at me, conspiratorially. I look around. Everyone is alive.
The next thing I know, we’re outside a club in midtown, the Next Bardo. This was where we met. A knot of Asian boys in a variety of Armani Exchange knockoffs tightens by the door. It must be after midnight if there’s a line to get in. Sung has left me smoking on the corner to see if he can get some old man to pay his cover. He’ll go in with the guy, ditch him and then come back out, licking the stamp on the back of his hand to press it to mine, hoping that the resulting blurry, manufactured contusion will be close enough to the real thing to fool the astute Japanese girl working the door, sulking in a tattered boa. This is the plan and it’s not working. Sung approaches every other old guy. The old men here are as cagey as they are desperate and intuit some kind of scam, waving him away. I’m bored and unsure of how we even got here. If we took a cab then half of our money for tonight is gone, wasted. Right now, I hate Sung. Taking these men by the arm, speaking in pleasing broken English when, having attended university in Australia, his diction is better than mine. Once he’s escorting these old men, there’s no reason to believe Sung will come back for me. He will leave me here.
Finally, a portly man consents to pay his cover. They go inside. I don’t want to wait for disappointment so I walk away.
If the inconvenience of emotion is this present and rising then it must be time for another bump. Taking the train downtown, I go to another bar. Not Boy Bar. If Sung comes looking for me I don’t want to be an easy find. I’m at a straight bar on Avenue B when I run into Lonnie. He laughs and feigns surprise when really his is a life where all surprise has long ago been drained away by rampant disenchantment and out-and-out lies. I mean, nothing sur
prises a drug dealer. But I get it and smile back. He’s out of cigarettes and, ordering both of us drinks, hands me a ten, asking me to buy him a pack. Taking the bill I turn and pause, he smirks. We both know I’m going to do this and he’s going to give me a bump.
In a bathroom stall we both smoke and take turns doing bumps off his wrist. He’s doing blow, which I don’t usually care for, it pulls me away from my K, drags me down the road of now, but I do it anyway.
Another bump off his wrist and as I lean in he puts his hand on the back of my head, gripping my hair.
I understand. Holding my nostril closed with one finger, inhaling coke, I feel a chemical heat sparkling up my nose. My other hand gropes Lonnie’s crotch. Eyes closed, I breathe my last breath above sea level. Plunging down to my knees, I work his tan cock too quickly out from between the lacerating zipper of his dirty brown corduroys. I sense him wince but see his dick gain tumescence from the pain of the slight metal teeth.
“Suck it,” he hisses.
Well duh, I think, putting him to my lips. I teethe at the bitter pout of his penis and feel his spreading flange across my tongue. Surprise. Lonnie coaxes a coke-coated finger into my mouth as well. Sparkle and numb. His cock rises as he gently shoves me further down, to deep-throat his cock. Loosening his pants, he pushes his underwear down to his knees; his bulging pubes scratch my tingling nose. I suck at Lonnie thickening in my mouth as if he were a source of oxygen, life. Everything I need. Disintegrating granules of cocaine bounce off my teeth as a slather of precum glazes my tongue. The bathroom tile is cold against my knees. I steady myself by grabbing his skinny ass with both hands. His buttocks contract in utter discomfort; Lonnie forcefully pushes my hands away.
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