Still Holding

by Bruce Wagner

  He came out five minutes later with a loopy grin.

  “One bet,” he said. “See? A man of his word.”

  “Asshole. How much did you lose?”

  “Five large.”

  “Asshole. Feel better?”

  “Fuckin a I do. Fuckin a, b, and c too!” Then: “I’m a disciplined motherfucker. I say what I mean and I mean what I say. But it’s fuckin weird, man. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve gone into a casino and placed one bet. I mean for bupkes! For ten, twenty, a hundred. I cannot tell you how many times I have done that in my fuckin life. And you know what? Man, tell me the odds, but I have never fucking won, not even once.”

  Rusty roused himself from a stupor to laugh, without opening his eyes. Cassandra laughed, then Grady too. Becca was blasted and smiled only because the others were merry and mellow. “And half the time, the dealers get blackjack!”

  “What does that tell you, niggah?” said Rusty.

  Becca stirred, clinging to him.

  “Tell you what it tells me, dog,” said Grady. “The house always wins.”

  Synchronicity

  HIS SON LAUGHS wildly at something on TV. Burke makes sure the only fare is DVDs like Shrek or Sound of Music or Chariots of Fire. Nothing violent or sexual. And no channel surfing: he guards against Kit mistakenly stumbling across one of his own films, or news reports about his injuries. Doesn’t want him watching Viv Wembley cavort on that idiotic series either.

  Lately, Kit erupts into hysterical outbursts in the middle of the night. (The sanghanistas like to say he’s finally getting in touch with the cosmic joke of it all.) Sometimes he sings himself to sleep like a child, but that’s the only time he comprehensibly strings more than a few words together, albeit slurred. He possesses an amazing surplus of energy—the sanghanistas call it ch’i—and Burke makes certain that energy is properly channeled, that his son is occupied by some form of therapy each waking hour.

  His father wants him out of there.

  His father wants him home in Riverside, where he belongs.

  He speaks in monosyllabic plosives. He says fuck a lot, eerily reminiscent of the patient with whom Kit and Darren Aronofsky visited months ago. One day, an inspired Tyrone brings Roy Rogers to the private wing for a summit. Seeing the two together—trepanned superstar and blastomaed McDonald’s franchiser—watching the Blown-Mind Twins sniff each other like tentative street dogs was a rocky horror show for sure—more like one Special Olympiad passing the torch to another, because it just so happened that Roy was at the stuttering tail end burnout of “I fuck fuck fuck” just as Kit was coming into his full-throated, full-chorus own. Like that summer Tyrone went to New York and John Stamos replaced Matthew Broderick in “How to Succeed” . . . but try as he might, Ty couldn’t get a dysfunctional duet goin. Connie Chung enjoyed the impromptu reunion, though Ty didn’t think she fully dug the interaction. She wasn’t twisted enough; it was a cultural thing. But he thought the way Nurse Connie kept wrangling the veggies so they’d be face-to-face like sexy toy soldiers was beyond dope. Tyrone shook his head and smiled. It was so messed up.

  • • •

  HE ASSIDUOUSLY LIFTS himself a few inches on the parallel bars. He grins madly, wily and rabid, flashing the erotically mischievous Kit Lightfoot of old. (A bad haircut ruins the effect. Fearful of “anecdotal” leaks to the press, his father shot down Kit’s stylist’s request to come give a trim.) His body glistens, the layer of posttraumatic fat belying its good bones; Portrait of a Bruce Weber almost-ran, with bad breath.

  • • •

  WITH MOUTH CLOSED, unspeaking, only the wobbly, jerky gait betrays him. After all, he was in perfect shape at the time of the assault; not so many months have passed. He never stopped moving—Burke forbade that—not even in coma. Therapists and sanghanistas threw his limbs around more than Christopher Reeve. Tyrone said, We the A-Team. Put Mr. Reeve to motherfuckin shame.

  • • •

  “HELLO, PIRATE!” said Tyrone.

  Kit wore an eye patch because the left lid drooped. He no longer tried to tear it off. Burke arranged for surgery; the docs said it was a simple fix.

  “Find any sunken treasure today, Captain Cook?”

  • • •

  VIV LEFT A MESSAGE on Becca’s pager that she needed her to pick up the Ambien refill at Horton & Converse.

  When she got to the house, Becca punched in the ROCK* code at the gate. As she wound up the drive, the FooFighters blasted. The front door gaped open.

  She set the pharmacy bag on the table and called out, “Viv?” She corrected herself: “V?” She thought she heard a response, muffled by music from upstairs. “V?”

  Barely audible: “Come up!”

  She went to the master bedroom. Viv was on her back, fucking. “Did you get the Ambien?” Becca had already shyly turned around. She said she brought it, and Viv said, “Where?” “Downstairs.” “What about the Norco?” Becca asked what was Norco and Viv said testily that they should have filled that along with the Ambien. Becca said she didn’t look inside the bag. Viv told her to go bring it. This time when Becca came back, Viv was on her stomach and the man fucking her faced the door instead of the headboard.

  It was Alf Lanier.

  Becca loved Alf Lanier.

  (It looked exactly like Alf Lanier.)

  Viv said to put the pills on the dresser and leave. Setting the Ambien down, she couldn’t help glancing over to see them sweat-coiled, and Alf caught her eye, either laughing or wincing, she wasn’t sure what. She thought that maybe the actors were making fun of her, “having sport” as Dixie used to say whenever Dad was being mean.

  • • •

  KIT WAS STONED—that was Burke’s idea. Pot helped with the pain and the muscle spasms. The staff looked the other way. Half of them were hemp-heads, anyway.

  There was so much fear that he couldn’t verbalize, which terrified him even more. So much shame and embarrassment. What had happened to him, really? Got his head hit. What hospital was this and what was the one before? Sometimes he went monkey nuts, throwing food and masturbating in front of staff and guests. He was hungry all the time. Ate and ate and started to get doughy. Sometimes he got confused that he couldn’t dress himself. He had blinding headaches and threw up, and they gave him shots that made him dreamy all the next day. The Shaved-Head people visited, some in robes but different from the flimsy hospital gowns that he didn’t even wear anymore. (Burke liked his boy to be in real-world civvies.) They made him laugh. Things were funny, especially when he smoked the reefer. Things on TV, and things his caregivers would say or do. It was funny when they read from books or said their prayers. They taught him mantras, those were funny too, repeating words he couldn’t understand, strings of words, one after the other, going to the end then beginning again. The sounds were strange, and sometimes he panicked he should know what they meant. He would grimace and nervously try to ask if he should know their meaning, and wonder if he ever would or if that was beyond him now, but in his crowned and crowning agitation, in his disorder, could not get inquiring words to form, and the benevolent patience and solicitousness of the sangha only made his fear and panic grow.

  • • •

  STOPPED LOOKING in mirrors.

  Not wishing to see his own visage or the purplish white fissures of his broken, thousand-petaled lotus.

  • • •

  HE FOUND OCCASIONAL respite in remedial Buddhist practice. The edifice had crumbled yet the foundation was there, rooted and unassailable. By his stalwart guests’ incessant cues, he slowly resurrected the meditative state, starry spangled night on mind-screen—disciplined sits over the course of a decade had stored in the body and served him well. The sanghanistas verbally guided him through: on days he couldn’t tie his shoes, he still crudely focused on the Shaved-Heads drum of Christ consciousness, seemingly lucid enough to laugh at his hallucinatory predicament. Words began to rearrange themselves like magnetized particles. A flurry of interchange, like a vast
hangar filled with square-dancing phantoms, crepuscular and insolent, dysphotic, drowsy and spooked, orphans and changelings come to vellicated, marvelous life as the orchestra struck up its synaptic symphonics.

  Sometimes being adrift was his only mooring.

  • • •

  ONE DAY RAM DASS came to see him. That was a great boon. Kit recognized him but couldn’t recall their meeting at the Gubers’. (Memory withheld its muddy welcome mat for the six months immediately prior to his insult.) Ram Dass floated over in his wheelchair and looked deep into his eyes. He laid hands on Kit’s shoulders and smiled, an electric clown.

  Ram Dass said, “Surf the silence.”

  He told Kit to think of his guru, Gil Weiskopf Roshi (whom Ram Dass reiterated he had known). “The guru will set you free.” He shared some rambunctious observations about his own recovery that were exorbitantly pertinent to Kit. He even got him laughing about the Hollywood game—Burke had steered everyone away from mentioning the Business, but Ram Dass cut through. “God,” said Ram Dass, “will always make more than you per picture!” He began to chant—Om Ram Ramaya Namaha—and Kit tried his best to follow (he’d been play-chanting with the sangha for the last month), swept up in its emphathenogenic energies. The others joined in while Ram Dass held Kit’s hand and wept ecstatically. They were all weeping now, even Kit, though water filled his smiling befuddled eyes as it would those of a sensitive child who had been moved not so much by others than by the joy-jangling vibrations of a great and noisy organ during mass.

  • • •

  SHE ASKED HIM to put it in her bottom, the way Kit did. Alf had never done that. Was that sodomy? He thought sodomy was the legal term for assfucking but wasn’t sure because every time he read about a sex crime in the paper they called it sodomy—there couldn’t be that much assfucking going around. (Could there?) Maybe the rapists and molesters knew a thing or two. He had tried before but had never been able to consummate. After amazing heroics, he would manage only to get the head in and the girl would say it hurt and to take it out. He didn’t really care all that much but felt it was his duty as a man at least to have the thing on his résumé. Other times, when the girl was seemingly OK with it, he lost his hard-on. Alf reasoned that he probably just didn’t get off enough on the deed. Wasn’t his kink. Or whatever. He thought maybe he was just lazy. By nature, he had a conservative streak—certain things had always creeped him out, like if a girl went down on him too wildly or tried to suck his nipple. Besides, assfucking was a control trip, and Alf prided himself on not having those kinds of issues with the ladies. Jailhouse issues, he thought. But now the tip of his cock was nudging its way inside the butt of his semiretarded best friend’s ex-fiancée. Viv worked it like a pro—kept urging him on, using her fingers to oil him with her juices while begging him to make it hurt, make it bleed—then suddenly he was in. It was a different pressure than pussy pressure for sure. 20,000 leagues under the sea. There was something metallic about it, mechanical, submariney. Das Boot. Das bootie. She slowly pushed against him, swallowing him up, and took the whole thing. Like watching a garter snake swallow a fuckin gopher. He asked if she was OK and Viv said uh huh and her shithole got wet, that’s how turned on she was. I didn’t even know a girl got wet that way. Once, he was with a stripper who shot a warm geyser from her puss when she came, but this was a first. He thought maybe he’d blundered onto the Secret of the Fags. Dark Tomb Raiders . . . Raiders of the Golden Sphinct—or maybe the hole was slick with shit. That would be fucked. He peered down in the half-light, and his cock looked clean on each outthrust. Wasn’t any stink. She probably prepared. Like when his mom went in for a colonoscopy and had to fast for twelve hours before. Sure knew what she was doing. . . . He began to ram her, devil-may-care, and she went crazy. The harder he rammed, the more she groaned and twisted and talked dirty. Maybe she was a pain freak—Fine with me. I mean, I don’t want to be inflicting it deliberately, but if I’m feelin good and whatever I’m doin happens to hurt as a sidebar but she gets off on it, then cool. Cool. Although he didn’t relish the idea of being back at Cedars signing autographs for the cops while Viv had her poop chute stitched by the same folks who’d tended Kit’s wounds. Then she told him to fuck her “up the ass the way your best friend liked to fuck me” and it wigged him but only for a second. All’s fair in loving and whoring. (That’s what Kit used to say.) Fuck me up the ass at the hospital, so he can watch.

  It took everything he had to concentrate on not coming.

  • • •

  EARLIER, HE GAVE Kit some pills, and now Tyrone sat with his charge while he nodded off. Ram Dass and his coterie were long gone.

  Ty snorted some crystal and massaged the star’s shoulders, oiling the skin. Smooth and unmarred. He rubbed oil into the FOREVER VIV, lovingly polishing the varied tattooed heart, Pacific Northwest Indian, and Sanskrit motifs. He reached around and rubbed the flat-muscled, soft-haired belly; the one-time orderly began to perspire and yawningly hyperventilate. He moved a hand up to the flat tits, tenderly tracing a finger around the nipple. He tongued one, nervously looking around, even though he knew nobody was there and no one would enter. Kit gaped with sleepified incognizance. Ty rubbed the tense muscle-braids of the actor’s neck for just a moment, then gently turned him on his back, softly whispering, as if auditioning the words aloud to see if the void would answer: I love you, Kit. He tripped on how the phrase sounded when uttered in the presence of the devotional object itself, tripped on the astonished hyperreality of it. Whoa. Whoa. Moved his hand to the radiant bush of soap-scrubbed pubic hair. Said, louder this time, “Kit Lightfoot is my lover.” His heart almost popped from his chest when he touched the shaft. Whoa—nearly fainting as he stood, he needlessly ran to recheck the door, already locked. Light-headed and light of foot . . . Lightfoot is my man. Lightfoot is my man—worked off the pants, fastened onto cock with his mouth, his own already leaking, clear as spinocerebellar fluid. Looked up, still sucking, at the idol of his prostrations and good fortune, to see perchance to dream if Kit was reacting. Any old reaction would do. Perchance to ream. The supernova only stirred, mouth open, and that was more than enough. He imagined the actor to be in some faraway place—a summer place . . . sucked and sucked, gentle, gentle, sucking, kneading, poundingheart, vertiginous stabs of paranoia whenever hearing nonsounds, willing now to lose his job and do hard time for this fleshy succor, this godhead paradise. I deserve this. Whoa. A K-Y’d finger in the ass to get Kit hard elicited a fart. Worked two more fingers in. Still got the touch. In and out till it was easygoing, leisurely cupping and weighing the balls between reentries. Big-time fun. Slid his pants down. Fingers in Kit then same fingers inside his own anus. The superstar groaned, eyes still shut. Heart slammed against steel cage of Ty’s torso, graveyard shift foundry, thin black pink-spotted snake cock in hand. Too excited!—oh no. No no no—Kit was half-hard from Ty’s expert manipulations. Jacked him fiercely, it was almost over, better luck next time, wanted Kit to come, mouth on it now as he worked his fingers like a safecracker’s, turgid ticking cock, lock to catch and spring, whoas! out loud, no no no shit no as he pushed further and sucked on Kit while jacking himself and Alf can hold it no more and is thankful Viv senses that and urges him on—maybe, he thinks, she’s in pain or I’m doing it wrong, can’t work it like Kit, can’t do the real deal dillio, I’m an assfuck loser—but he’s grateful she’s urging cause the thing he hates most is when a girl says, “Don’t come,” that means she’s totally frigid and wants to drag it out forever, he’s slept with so many of them, but Viv can come, can she ever, one of the lucky ones, doesn’t have a problem in the vaginal departmento, this he already knew from Kit’s innuendoes and Alf says “Now? Now?”—he doesn’t want her to think that he has to or needs to or wants to even though all of the above are true—and she says “Yes,” so he instantly comes in that tight slick chute and it feels better to come in a pussy but the cool thing, the kink of it is, that he comes in her bowel, in a place whose chemical wretche
dness kills babies, vilifies and degrades his sperm, and somehow that’s exciting, that she hereby consents to infernal degradation, such apostasy, adulterous and unadulterated, that is what makes him come so deeply while she arches beneath like an animal being killed until yes, Kit arches too, sharp coughy intake of breath, Ty’s four-fingered hand inside him while the other pulls Kit’s cock as he sucks and the star suddenly comes as Ty nudges the G-spot, the Motion Picture and Television Entertainment Liaison quickly bowing to suck the come, coming more himself without even needing to be touched or nudged, climaxing like a woman, immaculately, licking Kit’s shaft as it spunks Ty’s dark-backed palm-white hand, which has drifted to the tip, not wishing to miss a precious drop Viv is coming like she hadn’t with Kit in so long, Alf doesn’t know they used to talk about it more than the actual doing, mostly embedding fingers instead, and now she cries out and is crying too because she thinks of Kit and is getting off on the betrayal, a helpless whore who’d sell anyone or anything out, she would not even make the call to stop the WTC hijackers, she should have put the engagement ring on for this, further frisson, and though she knows that later she’ll feel badly, all those useless feelings of guilt, right now all she wants is to be evil, evil, supercallifragalistic axis of evil—please don’t let the coming stop—and she comes some more because she knows her new assistant is listening to the wolflike screams, in the entry hall or in gleaming $300,000 kitchen, sipping a diet Coke through a straw while taking it all in, the whole house reverbing with screams, CD juke shuffling to lame-ass Bright Eyes-Blur-Sheryl Crow, and she feels the warm narcotic glow of the Norco and the Klonopin, everything so perfect, she, still coming before plunging the white dick back into his mouth and it goes on, him doing cleanup with his tongue, it takes a few minutes like that to settle accounts and close the books, Tyrone like a runner slowly calms, he’s crossed the finish line now, walking aimlessly from the crowd until lungs and worldly locomotion are returned, remembering old History Channel kinescopes of Jessie Owens. . . .