Black John

by Amy Lane

  John frowned. “I’ll have to go back to California sometime,” he muttered. “I mean… it doesn’t have to end….” Oh God. How to say this. “I want to see you some more, but… but if I’m gone for a week, what will you eat?”

  Galen looked away. “Apparently you assume I’ll live on oxy.”

  “Well, there wasn’t much else in the house a week ago,” John snapped, hating to feel defensive about this.

  “I have someone buying me groceries,” Galen snapped back, and then his voice dropped. “Or I did. I forget. I might have fired them shortly before Tory….”

  “Would you consider a trip to rehab?” John asked baldly, surprising himself. “I… I care about you. Yeah, it’s been a week, but man, it’s been a sort of intense week, and I….”

  John had awakened the night before, snugged back to Galen’s front, his heart hammering, his breath coming short. In his head, he heard screaming, Tory/Galen begging him, Oh God, couldn’t John just give them one more fix? They’d die without one more fix, and John would be alone, alone, alone.

  He’d gotten up and gone to the bathroom, gotten a drink of water, come back to bed, and just stood brushing back the hair from Galen’s brow. Galen had slept the sleep of the drugged, unchanging from their first night, mouth slightly open, breath as regular as a time-released capsule.

  Oh. The dream was real. He was alone.

  “You what?” Galen asked acidly. “Would rather not waste any time on a junkie—”

  “Shut up,” John snarled. “You know what? Forget I said anything. Forget I suggested it. We’ll just do what we’re doing, and after the funeral, we’ll see what we see.”

  Alone, alone, alone.

  “John!” Galen protested, placating, “I didn’t say I wouldn’t—”

  “You just assumed I was making judgments. Did it occur to you that I am worried about you? Did it even cross your mind that a week ago you had little more in your fridge than bacteria and mold? You were living on oxy. And that maybe I don’t want that for you? Maybe I want more!”

  “Yeah, but what’s more going to get me?” Galen asked, disgust dripping from his voice. “According to you, once I get more, I outprice myself for you.”

  John was so surprised he had to double-check that he was on the turnpike to Orlando. For a moment he thought he’d jumped shift to a different planet. “What in the hell—”

  “You damned near said it yourself. When I’m at the top of my game, you won’t want me—”

  “No, I think it was the other way around!” He laughed. He had to. It was absurd.

  “What? You think I go to rehab, start practicing law again, and suddenly I don’t want a man in my bed anymore?”

  “Since you are gayer than an Easter parade, I’m assuming not,” John muttered. “But I would assume you would want a better man—”

  “You know, I must have been missing the part of your history that makes you a worse man than I am,” Galen snapped.

  “Sucked my first lover into porn,” John said, voice low, flat, mean as a snake’s. “Deserted him in rehab. Snorted half my company. Sold my best friend’s no-longer-whoring ass—”

  “DUI!” Galen returned. “Oxy addict. Got hand jobs from a heroin addict. It’s the devil’s résumé, John, on either side. But….” His voice wobbled, and John swerved through two lanes and off the freeway without even looking at the exit. The car skidded for a moment, but he recovered and turned right at the light.

  “What are we—?”

  “I want some soda,” John said, feeling petulant. He spotted a 7-Eleven through the rain and headed there. “And a candy bar. Six of them. Different kinds. And a chance to pee.”

  “You,” Galen said, lifting his lip in a faint sneer, “are going to spoil your dinner. I was going to make stroganoff.”

  “You didn’t say—”

  “I bought the ingredients last night when you were buying stock for my house. It’s in your refrigerator. You think you’re the only one who can cook?”

  Well shit. That was damned sweet. “One candy bar,” John amended. “And a diet soda.”

  “Now see? Look who knows how to compromise.”

  “I don’t see what compromise—”

  “How about we simply make plans to see each other after you have to go back,” Galen countered. “We concede that neither of us wants this to end. I look into getting my law degree in California, maybe start boning up for the bar. You maybe find a place for me, or make room for me in your own. And if we can keep it going, maybe we just run with that?”

  Because we can’t make any plans when you have to fill your prescription, Galen. You don’t see it, but that brown bottle changes your future, shortens your life and the places you can go.

  “Yes,” John said, appalled when the word dropped out of his mouth. A fake nickel, a bogus silver dollar—a yes that he wanted to be true but probably wasn’t.

  “You could sound happier about it,” Galen muttered.

  John wasn’t buying. “You could go into rehab,” he countered.

  “Go. Go get your candy bar. I hope it gives you pimples.”

  John bought three, ate one in the store, and gave one to Galen, who was waiting in the car. Galen looked at it, holding it between two fingers as one would hold a sweaty gym sock. “And I am supposed to…?”

  “Eat it,” John said, feeling somehow vindicated. “You are supposed to eat that bit of sugar and shit, and enjoy it, and know that you could eat a hundred of them and it wouldn’t be as bad as your next fix of oxy.”

  Galen grunted. “You are no fun at all,” he said. “But since you’re making me eat a candy bar as punishment, I’m not sure how upset I can get.”

  John scowled at him and then eased the car up to merge into traffic. Just that quickly, relief swept his shoulders. Tory would have fought him. Tory would have stalked outside in the rain—he had stalked outside in the rain before that third trip. John had gotten pneumonia chasing him down the damned shore about ten minutes before a tropical storm hit, because Tory didn’t want to talk about his goddamned addiction and how the second ten-day trip didn’t do it, and how money was disappearing again, and John couldn’t leave the apartment without coming back to find Tory blowing two guys and a monkey without rubbers, just for money for smack.

  We concede that neither of us wants this to end.

  Jesus, had Tory ever said that? Even at the end?

  You won’t leave me, you pathetic cocksucker! You’re too goddamned sorry for yourself, like what you and me did was ever more than fucking!

  John shivered and let a perfectly good hole in traffic pass him by. Nobody was behind him, and he dared to put his hand on Galen’s knee before the next spot opened up.

  Galen covered his hand, and John took a deep breath. “Thank you,” he said softly. “Thank you for thinking about it.”

  He eased out into traffic carefully, because the wind was really blowing, and a storm in Florida was nothing to piss off.

  “Thank you for giving a flying fuck,” Galen said, equally grave. “I am not sure what to do with that, by the way. I shall simply have to endure.”

  John grinned to himself and turned up the radio. God, K-pop—he didn’t even know they had a station for that here.

  “You cannot listen to that shit while I’m in the car,” Galen said stoutly.

  Classic rock was even better than K-pop—thank God they agreed.

  THAT NIGHT Galen really did make stroganoff. John didn’t eat much of it—it needed garlic salt desperately. John wondered if garlic salt was something he’d picked up in California, like the words “hella” and “rad.” But he did have John toss a salad (an actual green salad with carrots, Galen specified dryly—they could toss the other sort of salad later, when the lights went out), and they drank sparkling cider to wash it down.

  “Champagne,” Galen said archly as John poured. “White wine, pinot grigio—”

  “Sparkling apple, sparkling cranberry, and club,” John said resolute
ly, although he did remember when a nice wine would go nicely with his dinner.

  “Oh my, aren’t you the puritan.”

  John rolled his eyes, refusing to rise to the bait, and Galen sighed.

  “It’s more than just me and my little habit,” he said after a moment. “What’s wrong?”

  “There’s really only one thing to clean up.” Silence fell, and John wondered if the silver box had gotten any bigger for real, or if it was only his melancholy imagination.

  “Two,” Galen amended. “You haven’t looked at the laptop yet.”

  “It’s probably just all porn and viruses,” John said gloomily. “You know that, right?”

  Galen put his empty wineglass down, and John refilled it. Sparkling cider: $3.99 a bottle. He’d bought something like six cases the night before.

  “John, has it occurred to you that you haven’t asked me how he did it?”

  John closed his eyes. “I don’t want to know yet.” Because if he didn’t know, then maybe—

  “It happened. It happened. You told me yourself the body had been identified and cremated. You haven’t seen him in ten years. Why is it so hard to—”

  “I made it all the way to getting him to detox the third time,” John said, surprising himself and probably Galen to boot. He wasn’t planning to talk about how he’d found Tory before dragging him to rehab that time, but damn Galen, he wasn’t stupid.

  “Why’d you decide to go the third time?”

  “Because he was obviously using again!” John snorted and then grabbed the bottle of cider by the neck and just started downing it. The carbonation wasn’t sitting nicely in his stomach, but dammit, if it was the only vice he got, he was going for it. “I mean… I knew the signs. I knew when the track marks started showing up on his arms, for one thing. And then he’d see me looking and switch to between his toes or under his nail beds. But it didn’t matter. He’d forget things—everything from locking the door so I got all my equipment stolen, twice—to going through my wallet for cash. And that doesn’t count what he was stealing from me and selling either.”

  “And that didn’t send you to rehab straight off?” Galen asked, arching his eyebrows.

  John shook his head and stood. “You want to know how ugly it got?” he asked, snarling because he’d fought this memory for too damned long. “You want to know? Because I’ve got to tell you, this is gonna make the stroganoff go down really fucking well, okay? How about we skip this part—”

  “No!” Galen struggled and then stood, balancing his weight on the back of the chair. “You’re not letting it go. Not letting the rehab go, not letting me get away with any sneaky bullshit. Not once have you said, ‘It’s okay, I understand, you were in pain’—you know I’m in pain, but you know the drugs are worse. I want to know what you know, John—how bad did it get before you had to leave him?”

  “He was never fucking mine!” John shouted. Fuck, that felt like ripping barbed wire through his liver to say. “You want to know what the final straw was? Because it had to get pretty bad. I was pretty fucking pathetic, right. There were no heroics here, no John-the-fucking-Puritan making sure his boy was okay. I’m not that good a person!”

  “Oh, I think you are. Now give it to me, Johnny. You’re the one person who hasn’t treated me like a charity case or an invalid—make it real for me. Make me feel what it’s like to be stuck with a user—I want to fucking know!”

  “Great—great. So, our money is getting flushed down the toilet. I’m shooting Brant and Zion and a couple of their friends all the fucking time, because Tory? He’s too stoned to get it up, which means he’s not bringing in any income. You want to know when I really started using coke? It was then, because I was running the fucking business by myself, and it was either that or fall asleep at the editing table or behind the camera or behind the fucking wheel when I was cruising the fucking shooting galleries to bring him home.” Oh, he didn’t want to talk about those places. Another bad dream, and thank God for cocaine to cover the smells of urine, of blood, of shit, of death, of people cooking their flesh when they were trying to cook the spoon. Another way to wake up screaming, another way to think of for Tory to die. “And then one night, I get home from looking for him, and he’s there first….”

  John closed his eyes at the terrible vestige of relief that shot through him even now at the memory.

  “I was so happy,” he rasped, pacing through the kitchen. He should put the stroganoff away. He should open another bottle of goddamned carbonated apple juice. He should go back in time and invent another past, tell Tory what was coming, keep that first needle from ever going in his arm.

  Nothing could keep that first needle from ever going in his arm.

  “I was so happy when I heard his voice,” John said, looking into the wayback machine and seeing the apartment with the bare walls and no furniture and the once-new mattress soiled, in the middle of the floor, with bodies sprawled over it.

  “I got home, and he was naked, and tripping, and covered in come. He’d forgotten condoms—I mean, forgotten condoms—and one of the guys was trying to OD in our bathroom. And Tory saw me and just started to cry. Said… said….” It was okay, John. It was beautiful. And then you look at me, and it’s ugly. “I mean… he was always so beautiful when he was having sex. Just… it just reached around your throat and made you hard, he was so gorgeous. But… he was dying. He was dying, drowning, and I kept throwing him a rope to drag him to safety, and he kept hanging himself with it.”

  John, please. Just one high. Just one. John hadn’t given in, not every time, not at the end. But every time, Tory found his own goddamned way, didn’t he? “And… I… it hurt. It just… he was dying in front of me, and I couldn’t save him.”

  “You were supposed to save him?” Galen asked. By the look on his face, he was appalled.

  “I dragged him into that mess—”

  “How? How in the hell—you didn’t even do that drug!”

  “Don’t you get it? We were—I mean we got busted having sex in a friend’s bed. And his family… just, they just walked away.” John shook his head—he still didn’t understand how Tory’s family had just disappeared. “I mean, my dad put me in the fucking hospital, but that was no news. Nana was shocked it hadn’t happened before—and my mom, bless her heart”—and oh, he hammered the Southern backhand right into his mother’s perfectly sculpted face—“oh she was just so desperate for invitations to the places she couldn’t afford as a cop’s wife, she was just pissed that this time, people knew about it. So me? I could take it. I’d been taking it. I could have gone to hell and back as long as he was by my side. But Tory?”

  John’s voice trembled, dipped, rose, like a kid on a bicycle down a really rough road.

  “You gotta understand,” he begged. Someone had to understand. “He had this family, and they were… I loved them.” He hadn’t thought of them, not even to name Tory’s little sisters, since college. He could forgive Tory if it wasn’t his loss too. “They were… did you ever want a big happy family?”

  “I was an only child, John. Of course I did.”

  “Tory had it. Mom used to cook spaghetti every Wednesday, and I hate plain old tomato spaghetti, but I showed up every Wednesday because I got to set the table and sit down and listen to two grown-ups talk to each other like human beings, and to them talk to their kids like they were important. And I thought, Yes! That’s it! That’s what my life should have been! Except Tory and I get busted, and suddenly it’s not even Tory’s life anymore. And maybe he knew it was coming. Maybe that’s why it was always, ‘John, we gotta do this!’ or ‘John, let’s put it on film!’ Maybe he just wanted the world to see who he was because he was afraid his parents couldn’t love him as much as I did.” Oh God, Johnny, be honest. “Or as much as all those people jerking on their cocks who thought Tory smiled that way just for them.”

  There was silence in the kitchen, punctuated by the skittle of blowing palm fronds on the roof and the overhang
on the patio, but it was still a thunderous absence of John baring his naked, shredded heart.

  “So you let him get away with a lot,” Galen rasped.

  John shrugged. “I dragged him to rehab—wrapped a blanket around him and stuffed him in the car and showed up at emergency detox. Got him tested, got me tested, and then….”

  John shook his head. “I was going to sit with him, all twenty-eight days, but….” His lower lip wobbled. “The stuff he said to me… you want to think it was all the smack, right? But… but he never said he loved me.” Fucking loser, born to lick other men’s come out of my ass! “How was I supposed to not believe the bad stuff if he never said the good stuff?”

  God. Look at him. John looked around for the paper towel dispenser only to have Galen step in front with an actual soft tissue. John stood for a moment, let Galen wipe his cheeks and then hold the tissue for him as he blew his nose.

  The silence in the kitchen dripped with meaning, and John felt suddenly self-conscious. He took a step back, aware that Galen was close, and warm, and looking at him with compassion in his cloudy eyes.

  “I am sorry,” he said, voice shaky but Southern gentleman firmly planted. “Excuse me—if you let me go fix myself up, I’ll come back and help with the—”

  “Don’t,” Galen said, his voice as broken as John’s. “Don’t pull back.” He stepped into John’s space, wobbling as he moved without his cane, and John automatically put a hand to his elbow. Galen’s skin burned on his palm. John wanted to run his hand up the back of Galen’s arm, see what else could burn, but he stopped himself.

  “You wanted to know what it’s like to love a user. I… I think I’ve answered that.” John scrubbed his heated face with the palm of his other hand. “I… it wasn’t pleasant. But—”

  “I care about you,” Galen said baldly. “I care what you think of me. I hate that you see me stoned and asleep. When I start getting the shakes, you get this look in your eyes that makes me want to hide. It is like you know what it’s like to be me, at the same time you want to help me get better. That much compassion is terrifying to someone who made his living exploiting every weakness, do you know that? You are a better man as a sex worker than I was as a well-educated man in a suit, and now? I’m less than that man in the suit—”