In Morals class, they taught him that people “reap what they sow,” that people get what they deserve, that those who reject their family don’t deserve to have one.
They taught him that murderers go to prison and the lazy get sentenced to the street.
In Morals class, the kid learned that America was a Christian country because even the outcasts were given a second chance.
The only moments when the kid could be himself—when he wasn’t being brainwashed with ideas that gradually, against his will, started to seep in and make sense—was when he was in the bathroom. His wolfishness took over. He discovered ways of angling himself at a urinal to arouse the curiosity of younger boys. Perhaps they missed their older brothers, or had never seen something so dark and wrinkly take a piss.
In Morals class, they never said anything about the body and how it was supposed to grow and feel. With wolfish style, the kid was able to teach the boys all they needed to know about feeling good. He awakened them. A young body awakens gracefully like a grenade, like a tiny match flame in a room filled with propane gas.
The kid was thrown out of reform school. His family wouldn’t take him back, so he wound up on the street, where the real wolves got hold of him. They ripped him apart but the kid didn’t lose hope, knowing that living in a Christian country, he would eventually be given a second chance.
Allow me to make some predictions about the end of the world:
At 12:00 a.m. EST on January 1, 2000, slot machines at a racetrack in Delaware will stop working as a result of the Y2K millennium bug. Approximately 150 slots will fizzle, causing panic among gamblers who’ll claim that they were between five and ten quarters away from winning. Slot fiends from around the world will clamor to play these “unlucky” machines, creating a two-year waiting list.
If the world still exists, of course.
My latest food chain demotion was a trick at Broadway and twentythird, a sex pig from Brazil who worked as a UN caterer. We did crystal together and he asked me to fuck him without a condom. He paid me first.
Like everything else, I said why not.
It’s not that I didn’t know it was dangerous, but I do plenty of other things that are just as dangerous. I stick my bare hands down garbage cans and hope nothing pricks me. I sleep standing on subway platforms, tottering at the edge. I suck cock in dim lighting and forget to bring my genital warts questionnaire. The point I’m making is that if you have one exception in your risk management system, it all breaks down. There’s also something about the millennium that’s making me care less and less about the things that are supposed to matter.
When I came in his gaping ass, he gave me a satisfied look over his shoulder, a look that said his life was now full and complete with my sperm swimming up into him.
We squatted on the floor, watching the sun rise over an unchangeable skyline, rubbing our sofa-creased kneecaps. Between cigarettes, I scarfed whatever he had in the mini-fridge, chewing and smoking as meaningfully as I thought I should after having unprotected sex.
At first there was small talk. I explained how my life was slowly going down the shitter. He told me about UN toga parties where diplomats got unhinged and drank champagne up the ass. I had the nagging feeling this wasn’t the first time he’d barebacked, then by the third cigarette, the nag had grown into a suspicion that ate up conversation like a black hole. I felt really stupid.
“You should go get an HIV test,” he said.
“Yeah, why not,” I said.
Like everything else.
I try to ignore how hustling steals little pieces of your body and scatters them all over the city, and how you have to summon every last bit of energy to rematerialize into something whole again.
When you’re flying by the seat of your bankable ass from photo shoot to photo shoot, it won’t occur to you that you’re a prostitute.
When you step out of a limo with a glass of champagne, and a bodyguard escorts you through a tweaked-up crowd, past the velvet rope, and into Manhattan’s hottest night box, it doesn’t occur to you that you’re anything other than a celebrity.
When your likeness is enshrined on a gallery wall and the New York Times posits aesthetic arguments about your body, it doesn’t occur to you that you’re incidental, nevermind disposable.
The problem with prostitution is that no matter how high up in the food chain you get, there’s no such thing as an upgrade. It’s always prostitution, so long as your employer knows how desperate you are for cash.
The truth of whoredom only sinks in when someone pays you by shoving bills into your mouth. When they think a grubby, crumpledup hundred gives them the right to push you around, slap you, choke you, spit in your face, burn you with cigarettes, punch black eyes into you, fuck you till you bleed, cum in your eye, and piss in your wounds. When they make you lick your own shit off their middle finger.
But the truth of whoredom only really sets in when someone finds it unimaginable, inconceivable, and preposterous that you might have anything to write about other than the best way to get dried lube out of your hair.
When your intelligence becomes a running gag.
When you become subhuman.
It dry-fucks the soul something bad.
Dear Mr Marshall,
Although your submission doesn’t fit our current publishing needs, we thank you for submitting your story. We have noted that the New York Times recently covered a photography exhibit in which you participated. We encourage you to put as much passion into your fiction as you do into modeling.
The editors wish you the best in whatever career you choose, or whatever career chooses you.
Sincerely,
New York Times Magazine
A gay couple I know, Karanvir and Michael, asked me to move with them to a geodesic dome in the Arizona desert, one they had bought to prepare for the coming Y2K meltdown. They had maxed out eight credit cards between them. I refused, wished them good luck with the greenhouse farming and the life of debt, and told them never to call me again.
I was going to watch the world fizzle and burn from the best vantage point: Times Square.
“What are you writing today?” Richard asked.
Snap, click, whirr.
“Personal stuff.”
“Of course, but hello? Try me.”
“It’s about Derek.”
He looked at me through a lens I can now almost see myself through.
“Don’t tell me you’re falling in love.”
Click.
“Well, no, but ... we’re together. And I’m learning things about myself.”
“And you’re saying it’s all because of him?”
“No, but he’s involved.”
“In what?”
“My changes.”
“Right, so you’re writing about yourself then, not about him.”
“I guess.”
“By the way, I’m asking you, not telling you.”
“I know.”
Richard’s wise. I’m not sure what such a guru gets out of taking pictures of a hustler scribbling shirtless on his floor, though I’m sure he’ll eventually fill me in.
He’s wise, but I don’t think he sees the whole picture.
Shit and ephemera from another one of my tweak runs:
Japanese transvestite manga porn, razors, poetry, socks, roses, brand new televisions, vomit broken down into ingredients, unlabeled keys dangling over sewers, dead bumblebees, anonymous phone numbers on scraps of paper, unidentifiable plastic widgets.
Traces of a New York that one day, in all likelihood, won’t exist.
Beauty is designed to crumble just when you learn to appreciate it.
Pretend Indian massage and bullshit chakra-tuning to Spandau Ballet’s “True,” so good it can be done with or without clothes.
Playguy cover and special pin-up centerfold, September 1999. Crystal Vase shoots in a well-known but secret midtown BDSM dungeon. It’s a duo set, and I’m wearing an eye patch. I lay a sal
es boy from the Body Shop on a hospital gurney and make him drink my cum. He gives good camera winces when I pretend to tattoo my name into his arm with a cigarette. I make sure to pause and smile for Crystal.
Fan letter to Playguy, October 1999:Dear Playguy,
What a hottie! Let me know where you found him, so I can snap up the next one before your photographers do. Please tell Trey that he can come play volleyball on my property anytime, though I don’t trust myself not to chain him to the net. Lord knows what I’d do with that belly button and those candy lips. Yum! It’s nice to see such a fresh face on my nightstand, and I owe it all to Playguy. Thanks, guys.
I do have one bone to pick, however (no pun intended). It seems as if I’ve seen your model Jaeven a few too many times this year. He’s still kind of hot, but the j/o fantasies are getting kind of old. And what happened to his teeth? Time to bring in the new crop, don’t you think? Otherwise, great job with the magazine. Keep up the good work.
Harry in Great Falls, Missouri
Hello,
No. Good luck and please submit again.
Sincerely,
Tin House
“I believe in your work,” Derek tells me in bed.
I don’t say anything.
“Can I ask you a question?” he says, stroking my face. “Why doesn’t the kid in your stories have a name?”
I don’t say anything because I know that as soon as I open my mouth, I’ll just end up crying a year’s worth of shit that he won’t be able to decipher.
Vespers that bloom in the dark, trashed artwork, torn manuscripts, poetry you’ll never see, last words spoken to dying people who are actually already dead, most definitions of love, most definitions of death, things that are supposed to happen but don’t.
Part 3
BECAUSE CENTRAL PARK LOOKS freaky when all the leaves fall off and the trees just stand there naked and cold. Because naked bodies are hiding under heavier and heavier clothes.
My fingers are starting to freeze again when I smoke, and the air is starting to smoke when I breathe.
The cold rain can throw me into such a wicked mood.
“Jaeven Marshall, are you listening to me?”
Derek Brathwaite towered over my chair like a police investigator, an unlikely detective in his paint-smeared shirt. He was staring at me, and maybe through me a little.
“What does it look like,” I said.
“Of course you’re listening. You’re a speed freak. You have no choice but to be attentive.”
“I need to be aware of my surroundings.”
“You chew your lips off.”
“I need meth for my ADD. You know I’d be a wreck without it.”
“You’re doing it right now.”
“That’s because you’re sketching me out!”
“Shut up and listen to me. I’ve been taking notes on you.”
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a sheet of loose leaf, my life laid out in point form. I started to twirl a cowlick near the crown of my head.
“Insomnia.”
“So what?”
“I don’t know you anymore. You kick the turtles half the time, you’re so out of it.”
“I turn most of my tricks at night.”
“Newsflash, Jaeven. They don’t page you anymore, and now you’re blowing all of my money on meth.”
“Oh, so now it’s your money. Mommy cut you off?”
“Don’t be cute, sugar-pie, it doesn’t suit you. When was your last trick, and how long did that money last?”
“Whatever.”
My devil horn took shape under my working fingers.
“Have you looked at your teeth in a mirror lately? You have meth mouth. It’s repulsive.”
“Have you offered to pay for a dentist?” I zinged back.
“Don’t blame this on me. You’re the one who’s fucked up.”
He crinkled the paper, I’m guessing to signal a little victory.
“Dehydration, nausea, diarrhea, loss of appetite, rapid heartbeat, acne.”
“You got that list out of a book. Do you see any acne?”
“You’re acting defensive because I’m confronting you. That’s another sign.”
“Wouldn’t you defend yourself against false accusations? I don’t have acne and I don’t shit my pants ... Jeeeez. Did you learn all this from some talk show or something? One of those shows where everything wrong that happens is because of something? They tell you to confront the person, but they don’t tell you that it only brings more conflict into the relationship. Well, guess what—messed-up shit happens all the time, so you’d better get used to it. And I never, ever tweak in front of you.”
“Talkativeness.”
“Fuck off.”
The cowlick. I was losing this.
“And please, stop punding. I can’t take it.”
He sighed, walked over to the wall, and studied his latest canvas. My latest unpublished short story. A reform school never looked so piss-colored.
What’s punding?” I said.
“Compulsive fascination with repetitive tasks. The twirling, the chewing your lips, the grinding your jaw, the trash you bring home—it’s driving me mental.”
I was about to blurt out that life was nothing but a compulsive fascination with repetitive tasks, that we’re all just doing the same old thing because we’re afraid to try something new, that it’s the punding that keeps us too busy to kill ourselves or to hurt others too much, but I took a different tack instead, one I instantly regretted.
“Why are you doing this? Why are we having this conversation?”
I don’t know. I was expecting him to say that it was because he was worried about me, that he cared about me, that he wanted us to have a fresh start. But it was something very different.
“Because that’s how you talk to liars.” He folded the sheet of paper back into his pocket and looked me in the eye. “You never told me the cops busted you for possession.”
“They dropped the charges. I’m not technically a criminal.”
“No, but you’re a liar.”
“I just forgot to tell you.”
“That’s still lying.”
I can feel the itch of things to come:
At 12:00 a.m. EST on January 1, 2000, Kurt Vonnegut’s personal computer will list the date as being 19100, eerily reminiscent of the “timequakes” that so many of his novels have foretold. The author will then start working on a new novel of “suggested corrections” to the chronology of his previous ones, since his science-fiction hypotheses were based on the assumption that a “timequake” would never actually occur. Mr Vonnegut will leave the Y2K glitch on his personal computer unfixed, and he’ll continue to live 17,100 years in the future.
Wanna bet?
Dear Writer,
We suggest that you take a writing course, and/or read the following books published by our parent company: The UnFrustrated Writer, and Avoiding the Draft.
Thank you for considering us, but please refrain from submitting again.
Sincerely,
The Believer
“Did that really happen?” Richard asks, reading a random page over my shoulder.
Click, snap, refocus.
“That’s not the point.”
“Right, yeah, I get it.”
Zoom.
“Did the United States stop importing jasmine tea?” I say, tapping the empty cup with my pen.
New York got its first snowfall of the season last night. At first, it looked like the kind of snow the city’s underground heat would melt, but it stuck around and piled up. It’s funny watching bike messengers wobble through the mini-drifts gathered at the curb.
Jackie 60 dress code, Valerie Solanas Tribute Night—We Can All Shoot Andy Warhol:
Pop art razor blades, Boho dykewear, Hobo dykewear, newsboy caps, geo-patterned Diane von Furstenberg hip holsters, Factory ammo belts, Nico eyeliner, sixties hair, typewriter ribbon, street urchin fatigues with utility po
ckets, powdered white wigs, bulletproof vests, fake blood, Andy Warhol silkscreens on Stephen Sprouse knock-offs, flash boxes, Super-8 wind-up cameras, sewer scum.
Yesterday was December 8, the day I turned twenty-three.
Whoopty-freaking-doo.
I decided to go out and have some fun, to try and forget that I also had twenty-three days left to turn this year around and prevent it from being a complete failure.
Jackie 60 was full of night crawlers and Factory wannabes all trying to make out with each other. Morrissey was warbling through a remix of The Smiths’ “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out,” a song I know all too well. I don’t know why DJ Johnny Dynell thought the song had anything to do with Andy Warhol, but he’s earned enough cred to be given the benefit of the doubt.
The itch got to me, so I made a batch of Red Bull and crystal, probably one of my last. Then I finessed a couple of drinks out of some thirty-something easy marks.
I saw him canted against a wall watching the dancers—the same goth boy who was making eyes with me the last time I had come to Jackie 60. He was dressed in a black Elvis Costello suit and tie as if he were going to a funeral, or a wedding, or maybe that’s just how he woke up. I was in love with his canvas sneakers. He was so my speed.
I crept up behind him and he noticed right away. There was a flash in his eyes and a lull in the music. God bless Dynell for misplacing his wax.
“Let’s go to your place,” I said.
“Right.”
We didn’t say much, walking on the deserted sidewalk through Chelsea, kicking through the snow. It was too cold to smoke, so I hid my hands in my sleeves. He told me his name was Adam.
I followed him into a sketchy-looking establishment on Fourteenth Street.
“This is it,” he said.
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