Black John

by Amy Lane

  “Yes, well, I dated Taylor a month before we slept together. A short fall can hit pretty damned hard.”

  “Especially if you fall on your head,” John muttered, but he leaned back into Galen’s embrace.

  “Mm….” Galen felt peculiarly boneless now that he was riding the oxy, but he smelled like the shower, and still like their sex, and John was too emotionally stripped to be picky. “You smell wonderful.”

  “It’s the food,” John said with what he liked to think of as practicality, but Galen sighed and pressed another kiss on his nape.

  “John, can you do me a favor?”

  Oh. Easy. John put the knife down and turned, smiling faintly. Oh, Galen did fit well into John’s arms. His head, pillowed on John’s shoulder, felt heavy and sweet.

  “What do you need?”

  “Remember when you showed up to my place, and I was a little stoned but still functional, and you treated me like a real person, one with limitations but like I was real just the same?”

  “Uhm, yeah?” Three days ago. Was that all it had been?

  “Could you treat me like that when I’m talking about you and how I feel?”

  John’s mouth went dry, and he tried desperately to moisten it.

  Galen took the silence and ran with it. “I know when the shakes are starting, I’d probably sell my kidney for a fix, and it’s possible I’d do terrible things to get drugs, things I wouldn’t ordinarily even contemplate. I have no doubt. I am capable. And that yes, stoned is not at 100 percent. I know these things, John. But in the corners of being chemically impaired, there is room for truth. And the truth is, you have treated me with kindness and grace when I have least deserved it.”

  Oh, listen to his voice get all formal, Southern. Probably his courtroom voice.

  “Now I know you know firsthand that junkies are not trustworthy, probably because we lie to ourselves with every hit. I would swear on my parents’ grave that that pill I just took was my last, right up until it wears off. But that does not change the fact that I would have wanted you sober. I would not have slept with you if I’d been with another man, but I would have wanted you.”

  John studied the refrigerator with great care. Gleaming stainless steel, it held enough food for a football team. But then, there were usually twenty guys here, and Dex tried to feed them all. John had heard about the barbecues he threw whenever the house was full, just like the guys were getting together for a work function or as a family. He’d approved—but he’d never been to one.

  “I would not have reached for you then,” he said, trying to sound careless. “You would have been dazzling, too bright for me. You’re almost that way now.”

  Galen’s palm on his cheek was more gentleness than John deserved. “John… can I ask? I don’t even know how to ask. Where did your heart get this broken?”

  John swallowed, closed his eyes, and pulled away. “Honestly, whose mess have we been cleaning up this week?”

  Galen made a hurt sound when John turned back to the vegetables, which were chopped fine enough. “Now see—here’s where you’re right. If I wasn’t stoned, I would have known that.”

  “Yeah, well, I’d forget if I could too.” He paused in the act of scraping the veggies into the steamer and then put the steamer very gently on the burner and turned it on. “But you can lean on me if you want. That was really nice.”

  He dusted his hands off and waited while Galen repositioned himself, leaning his body limply on John’s, giving comfort as he could.

  Invisible Things

  THEY DIDN’T feel much like television after dinner, and Galen was nodding off as he sat.

  John took him to bed, and he fell asleep in the middle of a sleepy caress of John’s chest. John lay in the dark, watching him breathe with his mouth open, snoring slightly.

  God. Galen needed to eat more, and he should exercise more too. A little bit of mild sunshine on that pale skin certainly wouldn’t hurt.

  But he was a thing of beauty, scars or no.

  John had filmed young men with scars—auto accidents, skateboard accidents, my-stepdad-threw-me-against-a-wall accidents. They had worked out and tanned and then awakened to the fact that their bodies were beautiful, scars, moles, freckles, whatever, aside. And they had felt touch, honest let-me-pleasure-you touch, and had blossomed, unfurled glorious wings, and lived powerfully, at least from the first frame to the last of the shot.

  But he couldn’t do more than that. That shot, that encounter, that experience—those were John’s limits. He could praise a man to the skies about his looks, his stamina, his ability to pleasure, his willingness to throw energy into a room, but in the end, what the kid brought into the shoot with him was what he took away, for better or worse. John wasn’t a philanthropist, he wasn’t a teacher—he made porn, and glorifying that wasn’t in his job description.

  John didn’t want to shoot Galen, even though he thought he was beautiful. A shoot would be just that: a shoot. Six hours of filming, two guys with double-angle cameras, a fuckton of editing, twenty minutes of beautiful sex on film.

  He wanted Galen to see that he was beautiful forever.

  He was pretty sure he couldn’t do that when Galen’s little friend threw that fine mind into a muddle every six hours.

  God, it would be glorious to believe that Galen loved him best, but who would know better than John?

  Right now, he loved oxy best, and anyone else was a poor substitute.

  TORY’S FIRST trip to rehab almost wiped them out financially, so the second time, Tory decided to try to detox on his own.

  “I thought I could do it,” he said dreamily. They’d sold their furniture to pay the rehab bill the last time. This time John came home from a full day at school to find Tory on an obviously soiled mattress, the needle and the spoon next to him, three new punctures in the wasted veins of his arms. “I did. I thought, just a little. Just a little. John would never know.”

  John would ask him later how long he’d been thinking “just a little,” but he’d recognized the signs. The dreaminess, the sleeping, the short temper, the weight loss. He’d been taking “just a little” for the past three months. He’d only been out of rehab for the past six.

  “Oh, Tory.”

  “No rehab, Johnny. You just started making money again.”

  “Fuck money.” John knelt next to the bed, reluctant to touch anything there but Tory’s dirty hand. “Man, we’ll do it again. This time we’ll make it stick.”

  “Let me try it myself,” Tory begged. “It’ll suck, man, but… just detox. I can do the outpatient when I’m done, the voluntary ten-day, okay?”

  Twenty-eight days had obviously been so successful.

  Oh God. John had only just confessed to Nana, only just told her why they were barely scraping by. He’d had to. Crosby had done their taxes—he knew how much money they’d made and which crappy apartment building in Orlando they lived in.

  “John, tell me truly—are you using?”

  He didn’t tell her about the occasional cocaine, because it was just that—once every other month or so—or about the times he’d tried smack and hated it and simply walked away. His conscience felt completely clean when he said, “No, Nana. It’s Tory—it’s… you know how he is.”

  Her eyes went dark and compassionate, even as her mouth pursed grimly. Oh God. They’d tried to be his family, both of them, and even Crosby too. But Tory… he could never be alone, ever. In the evening, when the house was quiet, he would go into his room and turn the television up really loud and sit outside and do his homework. John asked him once what he was doing, and he said, “Pretending it’s my family.”

  During college John had needed to buy noise-canceling headphones to get anything done after five o’clock.

  He tried. He worked hard, made Italian for dinner, set schedules, planned something for them to do every night, even took Tory to the park on Sunday so he could hear little kids playing and moms yelling. These things had never turned John’
s key in particular because his mom had never kissed and played and cuddled, but he would do about anything to be Tory’s family. Nana had them to dinner at least once a week. But Tory’s parents had never called, never written. Tory had sent them Christmas cards, and they had only been returned. Sometimes he would disappear for just long enough to drive to their old neighborhood, sit for a half an hour, and drive back.

  If John cared to do the calculations, he would wager Tory had done just exactly that right before he tried “just a little,” and squeezed the lube on the slide to hell.

  John spent the next week at the bottom of that slide, cleaning puke, sweat, diarrhea. After the second day, he called Brant and begged him to bring those big absorbent mats they put under seniors. He made Brant leave the special pads and garbage bags outside the apartment door at first because he didn’t want anyone to see Tory that way. Let the world watch his asshole get torn almost inside out by Zion’s cock? Sure. But let their closest friends see him lost in filth, withdrawal, and madness? That was a little personal, right? But it didn’t matter—in the end he’d needed their help to throw the mattress away, and half of the sheets.

  Sometimes, when he was particularly stressed, and especially when he was doing a lot of blow, John would go to sleep for a minute and wake up, heart thundering, imagining he could hear Tory screaming at him, too weak to get up and go buy but angry, furious, foaming-at-the-mouth pissed that John wouldn’t get him some fucking smack. Sometimes John was certain he was going to be in that claustrophobic, windowless bedroom in that shitty apartment forever, trapped, held hostage by Tory’s colossal, slavering need.

  But they came out, right? That was what John told them both when it was over and they were lying on clean sheets and the new mattress that sat on the freshly cleaned carpet. Tory had lost twenty pounds—John and Zion had fed him Gatorade through a straw in the last day because John had been terrified his body would shut down. He lay next to John, thin, listless, barely conscious, and John cried on his freshly washed naked shoulder.

  “We came out. You’re going to be okay, right? We’re both quitting everything. Never again.”

  “Right,” Tory breathed. “Never want to go through that again. Don’t worry, John. I’ll stick to sex. Cleaner high.”

  Oh yeah. If John had learned anything from that wearying, shattering week, it was that junkies lied.

  CAREFULLY, SO as not to disturb Galen’s innocent, chemically ridden sleep, John slid out of bed behind Galen and put on his boxers, then padded two doors down to the actual working study. It wasn’t that late, right? Ten o’clock?

  Don’t call your friends after nine, John, that’s not polite. Of course, Nana didn’t know he and Tory were sneaking out at ten to meet the friends they called at nine. John couldn’t remember one single thing his mother had ever said to him that mattered, but every word Nana said apparently fell from God’s lips to John’s ears.

  Well, hell. John finally had the balls to do it—he wasn’t going to let a little thing like the clock stop him.

  “Hello?”

  “Brant?” Oh God, the number was old. But Brant and Zion had moved into a decent place after college. They’d used the porn money to finish their education—Zion became an engineer and Brant worked retail. John had been exchanging Christmas cards with them for the past ten years, but it was still a surprise that their number hadn’t changed.

  “John?” Brant’s voice shrank. “Oh God. John….”

  “So I don’t have to tell you why I’m calling,” John said. It had been a month—he figured news would have gotten around.

  “I’m so sorry…. John, I’m so sorry….” Brant started to cry, completely undone.

  The next voice that spoke into the phone was Zion’s. “You can’t yell at him,” Zion barked, his voice only deeper after the ten years.

  “Why would I yell at him?” John asked, baffled. “I… guys, I know you know Tory’s gone, but… I mean, I’m supposed to be in charge of the funeral and shit. And his apartment. And—”

  Zion’s voice suddenly softened, and John remembered the guy who used to laugh uproariously at his fan mail, at being VJ’s notorious Black Stud with the Monster Cock. His scenes with Brant and Tory kneeling to his every whim had probably furnished their first apartment.

  “You’re in charge of cleaning up his mess,” Zion said, and John heard the tenderness of a friend.

  “Yeah, well, couldn’t escape it.” Remember when cocaine made him feel like a god? God, John missed cocaine.

  “You could have, but you didn’t. It’s nice of you to call, though. We… I’m thinking there’s some stuff you haven’t gone through yet in Tory’s room?”

  John had a thought to the silver box and suddenly wondered what was in there that they knew about and he didn’t. “Yeah. Uhm… is there something I should know?”

  Zion made a whuffing sound, the kind that reminded John that his friend was almost forty. He’d seen their Christmas card photos, and Zion was no longer a skinny bit of fabulous—he was now a full linebacker’s share of fabulous with an extra three inches in height thrown in. “Man, you just call us when you get there, okay?”

  That was not encouraging. “O-kay… but, uhm, in the meantime, there’s going to be a funeral. On a boat. Taking off from the pier in Daytona. And ashes. And someone’s going to have to say something, probably me. And it’s going to be a laugh fucking riot. You two, uhm, wouldn’t want to….” God, he couldn’t even make himself ask them.

  “Yeah,” Zion said, his voice dropping. “If you still want us when the time comes, you give us the details and we’ll be there.”

  John almost cried. His eyes burned and his breath stopped hard and aching in his throat. “I’m just so glad you’ll be there,” he said. “It… I mean just me and Galen, you know? And that’s not fair. That’s no way to send off a friend, right?”

  “Right,” Zion said gently. “Is Galen the neighbor? Me and Brant met the neighbor once or twice, but he probably doesn’t remember.”

  “Yeah,” John said, wondering how much oxy Galen had taken that day. “He’s… well, it’s everybody’s demon, right?” Because Zion and Brant, they’d had their struggles. That was one of the reasons they’d helped put John in that car for California. When they’d quit—everything, all the drugs, all the alcohol, all the porn sex—they’d done it together, as a team. Tory wasn’t part of that team, no matter how badly John wanted him to be.

  “Not yours,” Zion said with some admiration. John had always been the one saying no. Ugh, how the lowly had fallen even lower.

  “Is now,” John admitted. “Fresh from rehab—got that ‘no cocaine for me’ smell.”

  “Sorry,” Zion told him, and now he just sounded kind. God, John needed to get out of this conversation.

  “No worries.” John shrugged. “Seriously. After cleaning up Tory’s room… man, nothing gives you the impetus to stay clean like reliving that memory.”

  “Oh Jesus. John… this conversation is just not getting any better. Please tell me you’ve got some good news!”

  John smiled bitterly but tried to keep that wormwood out of his voice. “Yeah. I’m going to see my good friends Zion and Brant again. We’re going to drink sodas and eat shrimp, and toast to someone we really loved, and then we’re going to take a boat trip on the ocean and tell him good-bye.”

  Silence on the other line, and then Zion spoke thickly, voice congested and cramped in his throat. “That is good news. Seeing old friends is always good news. We’ll be glad to see you, Johnny. You’d better believe it.”

  “Thanks,” John whispered. “I’m so glad you’re coming. You’ve got….” He cleaned his voice up. “You have no idea.”

  Zion’s sigh was resigned. “I’ve got some. Call me later with the details, okay? Time I get my boy to bed.”

  John sat down on the study floor, clutching his warm cell phone to his naked chest, digging his toes into the ornately flowered area rug. Oh God. Thank you. Thank you so much for
old friends who wouldn’t make John and Galen go out on that boat alone. Especially John. Because funerals sucked, and if John could do any sort of drugs to get through this one, he’d do them. But he couldn’t, so friends would have to do.

  THEY WENT to the free clinic the next day and got tested, which was great—it hinted at the future.

  Unfortunately the near future wasn’t that awesome.

  It took them three more days to clean up Tory’s apartment. They found four more stashes of heroin in the CDs and quickly flushed each incriminating little packet down the toilet. Now that John didn’t have any incriminating little packets of his own, he was acutely conscious of how much trouble every dime bag could get him into.

  “Man, you’re lucky you chose prescription meds,” he said to Galen after they found that last bag. “At least those aren’t illegal to have.”

  Galen snorted softly. “Tell that to my four doctors,” he said.

  They weren’t just cleaning up Tory’s apartment this time. John insisted on spending some time on Galen’s as well. He bought dusters and more 409 and some cleanser and cleaned Galen’s bathroom (not nearly the horror Tory’s had been—John found himself giggling to himself in the thirty minutes he spent in there, his relief was so acute), as well as vacuumed the area rugs and washed the walls. Galen helped. Once, while John was working diligently on the massive CD sort, Galen disappeared and came back covered in dust bunnies.

  “Where in the hell—”

  He could see Galen’s pink cheeks through the dust. “Swept under my bed. If we’re spring cleaning, shouldn’t we at least get there?”

  Of course they should. They even got behind the refrigerator and into the cupboards. John made him take a trip to a real grocery store, not the tiny market, and buy canned foods, soup, dry goods, and groceries for the freezer.

  “But I’m spending all my time eating with you!” Galen laughed as they were driving back to Cypress Point that night. The skies were still stormy, which meant that the pretense of letting Galen use the pool was an obvious pile of crap. Galen was coming home with John to eat dinner, watch television, and have sex—possibly in that order, television optional.