I remind him that not every color in the household product universe is sold in tubes, or can be replicated, but he disagrees. He won’t give up.
He’ll agonize over a seafood cream sauce for hours, hunched over a nonstick T-Fal pan brooding over the tint, wondering if white was always off-white, becoming more sure with every stir that only the blind can see the color that milk is supposed to be.
Here is a partial list of the color schemes that Derek spends his life trying to create, with varying degrees of success:
Nasturtiums bashed to death in their own pollen.
Butterfly wings lit by moonlight.
Tire skid marks on new pavement.
Charred African violets dipped in wine.
Brittle hail in a lightning storm.
Cut-up gums medicated with strawberry juice.
Sea foam green.
The scabby red of scratch marks healing on my back.
The blackening of blood is particularly hard to capture because it’s always in a state of change. Derek can never decide when it’s reached the peak of beauty. He fawns over my back from moment to moment.
He dribbles and spatters, stirs and folds, mashes and kaleidoscopes until the insanity of being perpetually almost there makes him throw the whole mess against the wall.
And, of course, colors are never the same when they dry.
I have something to confess to you. That part about getting beat up behind a dumpster, it wasn’t all true. I’m kind of embarrassed about it, but I wanted you to experience the emotional grit I felt. The guy was real, and so was the hundred bucks between my cheeks, but he fucked me in a hotel room, not behind a dumpster. It’s just that I wanted you to see me the same way he did—as a piece of trash. If I told you about the room service and champagne bucket, would you have been able to relate to my pain? Probably not.
The donkey-punch was also a bit of a stretch. It was more of a playful slap, but I needed you to see the humiliation in full bleeding color. The bruises were real, but I had to give them to myself. I had to make the outside of me match the inside of me.
I know what you’re thinking. You’re wondering if everything I’ve told you is a lie, and you have every right to be suspicious. But you have to know that I’ll never lie outright, I’ll just transform, until you get the point of what I’m trying to say.
I haven’t had a friend in years. Derek doesn’t count because our web gets sticky. I’m talking about someone you can spill your guts to without worrying you’ll hurt them. Emotions on a dimmer switch.
You know ... a buddy?
Cops on every corner, undercover feds in navy blue Crown Victorias, detectives pretending to be cab drivers.
Multiplying like amoebae, ticketing urinators, narcing through the five boroughs, talking sideways into radios, cleaning up, ticketing smokers, bleaching Broadway, closing peep shows, clamping down, speeding up, erasing the smell of cum from Eighth Avenue, the smell of beer from the subway, ticketing other cops, hauling in rent boys, stealing joints, stealing turf, turning shoplifting into a bloodsport, catching us all.
I’m beginning to wonder if I’ll ever get published. They say that writers should scribble something every day, but these days the words come so hard.
I can’t even write at alt.coffee, a supposed writers’ café where inspiration comes in three forms: iced coffees, lattes, and Nanaimo bars with some kind of insane shit in them, either speed or Drano.
The incessant whine of the coffee grinder isn’t what bothers me, and it’s not the horrible décor: decrepit sofas in puke yellow and blister red, lamps with torn velvet shades. It’s not even the conspiracy nuts, swapping theories over deafening laptop key clatter, who drive me crazy. They talk about the Internet as if it’ll still be around in five years.
It’s the actors, the ones so slick that gum doesn’t even stick to their shoes, who make me want to retch.
A Colgate smile flashed in front of my face.
“Hey, I’m Chase, and a school bus crushed my legs.”
They looked intact to me.
“Terror Firmer by Troma Films.”
“Excuse me?”
“He’s an actor and he’s almost famous,” an earthy girl beside him said. “Famous people are allowed to speak in incomplete sentences. I’m Forest.”
“Oh.”
“They had a school bus crush my legs.”
“Brilliant,” I said.
“He is,” Forest said from under her beige Stevie Nicks shawl.
“Are you famous, too?” I said.
She smiled like she had eaten a lemon.
“So what do you do, dude?” Chase asked me.
That shock of conditioner-soaked hair.
“I enjoy life.”
He and Forest laughed in measured staccato notes like they had rehearsed this before. I was playing my part exceptionally well, considering this was my first run-through.
“You have to do something,” she said. “You can’t not do anything. This is New York.”
“I’m a writer.”
“Rock the Casbah,” Chase said.
“Wait—are you published?” Forest said.
“Not yet.”
“So then what do you really do? Don’t be ashamed of how you spend your life.”
“Dude, he said that he’s a writer. He’s cool.”
Chase checked out the café, I’m guessing to see who was admiring his hair, and Forest took my hand in hers in a creepy way.
“I can feel that you’re a communicator.” Her eyes shot wide open. “A great one. Unpublished writers have so much potential. You’re bursting, aren’t you? I can ... mmm ... feel it.”
“I told you he was a writer,” Chase said, and slapped me on the back.
I know I’m going to sound like a snob, but it needs to be said—if you don’t have Fiorucci sneakers like mine, your life will be shit, and I can prove it.
Do you think blisters are the way to happiness? If you’re not wearing calfskin uppers, you’re going to need a lifetime supply of Band-Aids. Hacks like Salvatore Ferragamo think they can get away with rubber soles when they should be leather, while cheapskates like Bruno Magli use proper leather soles but make them too thin. They either want you to destroy your arches or puncture yourself with city sharps.
I wonder how Manolo Blahnik expects to build a fashion brand around glue. Even people who cripple themselves with mediocre footwear know that sewn construction is the only way to keep a shoe together. It’s common sense.
I should work the clubs, Derek told me, if I wanted to get a less violent clientele. That was nice of him. He went so far as to suggest the club, this Derek. This uninspired painter who needed my bruises.
It’s an unseasonably hot winter night. March came early this year—a spring hijacking.
Stinking, rotting meat. Lamb’s blood putrefying on the sidewalk, and it isn’t even Passover. Entrails that lazy meat handlers couldn’t be bothered to pick up. Chicken gizzards, or giblets, or whatever the hell they’re called. The snow has melted and mixed with the blood, and this pinkish liquid is running over the curb.
I love the Meatpacking District.
It’s a Disneyland of death, shoe stores, and clubs. I pass The Lure, a club that I heard still has the original meat-hooks. You can hang your coat on them, car keys, balls, whatever. It’s a slightly more upscale sex pit than The Manhole, which is just a few blocks over on Tranny Way. Ninth Avenue, I mean.
Sneakerful of meat juice.
Joe’s Steakhouse, Lambs Unlimited, Prada. A perfect trinity on every block. If I told you the name “Hogs and Heifers,” I bet you couldn’t guess what they do.
I soccer-kick a sheep’s eyeball into the sewer.
I find it no coincidence that the first night I walk through New York feeling reasonably empowered is the same night the streets are washed slick with animal blood, warm and feverish.
Things are looking up for me. I’ve managed to start a new story that I can’t talk about yet because it
might interfere with the creative process, but I can tell you that it’s freaking intestinal. And I’ve found someone. Derek is stabilizing my life, though I don’t trust our relationship completely yet. It’s too perfect. It’s hard to let go of a history of failure that likes to repeat itself.
Jackie 60 is the club that nobody knows about but everybody goes to.
I walk in wearing a T-shirt I bummed from Derek that says “Rape the Twinks.” The Columbia art school hipsters are giving me dirty looks for being more ironic than they are.
The upstairs bores me immediately. It’s this over-glamorized holding room lined with faux Louis XIV divans and aging queers holding martinis. Blah. They rot while Blondie videos run on a constant loop.
In the basement, I descend into the pure thump of Eurythmics, courtesy of DJ Johnny Dynell.
The eighties are the new nineties, they say.
The drunken dancers know it and they’re doing the barley mash. There are the usual hardened lumps of sex and other reminders that we’re young and free and we own the universe (well, most of us).
I order a vodka cranberry, I don’t pay for it, and I don’t ask questions.
There seems to be some confusion that I’m a dancer and not doing my job, and the crowd kind of pushes me onstage with collective indignation.
Shit. I’m thrust into this BDSM church scene, turns out I’m an altar boy fucking a priest while a nun hung on a giant fiberglass cross is whipping her clit. I don’t know how I inhabited this role so easily—it’s like I’ve been fucking priests all my life.
Now I’m making a mess because I’m rocking Father doggy-style while spilling a Long Island Iced Tea that somehow replaced my vodka cranberry.
The song ends, the nun cums on her rosary, and somebody unhooks her from the cross. The priest falls face down and about twenty guys stick singles in my waistband. Some of them fondle my bulge. What the fuck. Then one guy slips me a twenty and buries his face in my jeans. The others get their cue to scatter.
“Care for a drink?”
His politesse sounds fake because he’s gawking at me from the inside of a beer glass. I don’t officially work here, so I can “turn down business” without getting thrown out by the tranny bouncers, but something about the idea of taking advantage of this jerk appeals to me.
I own this city. I can feel it somewhere deep in my gut, that feeling of ownership that comes with being the master of desire for so many rich, pathetic, whinging American men.
Historically, they’ve been the ones in charge, but little revolutions happen every day.
It’s time to take control.
It’s time my freaking balls dropped.
But I’m not really paying attention to him anymore. There’s a goth boy staring at me from across the dance floor. He’s darkly beautiful. Twenty, twenty-one. A heavy Neanderthal brow inched over long, wet lashes. Eyes that are impervious to the strobe lights, where thoughts pool, drain, and refill. His gelled hair is bed-sexy—every spike is exactly where it shouldn’t be.
I like the message he’s sending me.
“I said, care for a drink?”
I’m spacing out, and surprised to see that my trick’s still there. I finally get a good look at him. He’s pretty cute, with just enough hair to still be sexy for a thirty-something, but I’m not going to let him get me that easily.
“No thanks, I’m still working on my iced tea.”
“You have a great ass. Mind if I touch it?”
“You can’t afford it.”
I jump off the stage. The other clubbers have cleared a space around us.
“Here’s a hundred bucks,” he says.
“What the fuck for?”
“For nothing ... For being sexy. Well, actually, if I’m giving you a hundred, I want you to use my name. It’s Jason.”
“Hi Paul.”
Tricks like it when you fuck with them like that. I give him my tough punk look, my raised eyebrow and lip sneer, and take the money.
“It’s only half of the two hundred I won in a bet that I couldn’t get you off the stage. I don’t mind losing it.”
I was obviously dealing with a professional. But a professional what?
Paul points to his friends drooling at the bar. They’re getting me more drinks, I can tell by the parade of rainbow-colored cocktail umbrellas.
I’m getting woozy. I hold my glass up to the strobe lights and swish it around. It splashes in arrested clicks of time, but I can’t see anything suspicious dissolving on the bottom.
“I might be able to give you the other hundred,” he says, chewing his liquor. “What do you do?”
That question.
“I’m a writer.”
“Perrrfect. I happen to be doing a photographic project on New York writers in the nude.”
I love seeing the flicker of a lie in a trick’s eyes. It makes me pre-cum.
We leave Jackie 60, I sit my ass down in the taxi, and we’re off.
Stuff I just happen to come across:
Snot wads frozen into gumdrops on the sidewalk in winter, rats speared by syringes, Lego revolvers, hair-weave tumbleweed, congealed balls of motor oil, barely recognizable people lost in building cracks, doggie mud pies you find by surprise when the snow melts, ants swarming popsicle sticks in summer.
While we crossed the bridge to Williamsburg, an industrial-cumhipster Brooklyn neighborhood, I sat alone in the back seat of the cab, chauffeured. Paul told me that it was good we were both artists because artists could feed off each other.
Did he honestly think I was falling for his crap?
The elevator doors opened to his loft and he flipped a set of switches. On came the lights and The Verve’s “Bittersweet Symphony,” and the blinds retracted to give a twinkling view of the Manhattan skyline.
Living pretty large for an artist, he was.
“Get comfortable.”
I pulled my notebook out of my back pocket and laid it on the giant Lego coffee table, then flopped into a La-Z-Boy chair and put my feet up.
“I mean take off your clothes.”
“How much are you paying me?”
“Two hundred. These shots might not even get printed. I’m only doing it to keep my camera from rusting.”
“Three hundred or I walk.”
“Have fun walking over the bridge. Two hundred.”
“And fifty.”
“Two hundred. If I give you an extra fifty, it’ll be a tip because I like you.”
I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to take control, so far from the street, so far from my comfort zone. He loaded film into his camera and tossed the empty plastic canister like a peanut shell. I shucked my jeans.
“Tell me about your writing.”
“It would go over your head.”
“I like it when you’re saucy. Give your cock a squeeze. Make it purple and angry for me ... Riiiiiiight.”
Click, flash, and that electronic camera whirrrr.
“Now give me a sad face ... Sadder. Think about your mother dying. Your cat chasing a moth into the fireplace. Photography is about emotion. Good.”
I followed his orders even though I knew he was full of shit, only because I wanted to be professional.
“You know,” he said, “I’m friends with a few publishers. Stretch your foreskin out and show me some pit.”
I got a full boner just hearing that magic word. The “P” word. I cranked an elbow behind my head and leaned back in the La-Z-Boy. He shot the worshipper’s view from the floor, angling the camera squarely at my crotch. Click, whirrrr. Some shots of my chicken-white thighs with their goosebumps, then my balls, and up my shaft, inch by inch.
This camera lens climbing my genitalia left me feeling strangely powerful. My wang throbbed to the smell in my nose, the smell of the ink of my future books.
“They say that the best manuscripts are illegible. Coffee, ink, blood stains. They call the writer in to decipher, to read in his own voice. It kills them. Publishing contract wit
h a big advance. I’m excited for you.”
Snap, click, whirrrr. He was giving me funny looks.
“We’re almost done. I want to get some relaxed shots of you drinking whisky. All the famous writers knew how to appreciate a good rye blend. You can even write if you like.”
He poured me a highball the color of diluted apple juice. I had no reason to suspect him. If he’d really wanted to, he could’ve slipped me a roofie at the club, and right now he and his barfly friends would be nailing me shitless.
“Take a sip.”
Click, whirrrr.
“Again.”
Snap.
“Fantastic. Now, one last shot. Flop your dick in the glass like the whole world’s turning upside-down and it doesn’t matter what you do.”
I did it and was suddenly lightheaded. Everything felt perfect and dreamy in a way I didn’t trust, like something was wrong, but in such a remote way that it was beyond the reach of my brain. It was kind of David Lynch.
“That’s it,” he said.
“What do you mean.”
“You can go home now.”
He hadn’t even asked for a cumshot, or tried to jerk me off or finger my asshole. What the fuck. And he paid me two hundred bucks, on top of the hundred he’d given me at Jackie 60.
On the elevator down, there was that otherworldly lightness again.
I suppose it matters less how you fall asleep on the train than where you end up.
The city was bass-ackwards when I woke up in Brooklyn. It was morning. I must’ve gotten my nod on, sleepwalked a switch from the L train to the D, and ran the forty-one station line a couple of times, end to end.
The white sand on the elevated subway platform crunched under my shoes. The sun swelled my hangover to a full skull ache, and the salt in the air made me lick my lips. I gazed out at a body of water that didn’t end, just got hazier. Below, the waves were rumbling like blue Pontiacs over the beach, a beach that stretched your eyes for miles in both directions, past the rusty metal skeletons of amusement park rides under lockdown.
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