Black John

by Amy Lane

“You make an excellent case,” John said sagely. For the past three days, Galen had been charging the computer at his kitchen table, where it had loomed like a distant mountain. As John moved reluctantly to the table and lifted the lid, Galen went into his room and came back with the shoebox covered in tinfoil, and set it next to the computer. John had apparently made it through the green valley of hazmat cleanup and was now climbing the mountains of Tory’s demons.

  Wonderful.

  “If I disappear into this thing, call my place of business and ask for Chase Summers. He’s going to be a computer engineer, and he may be able to pull me out,” John said, only partially kidding.

  Galen didn’t laugh. “I’m going to go watch television,” he said. “You let me know if you’re going to take this seriously.”

  “Fine, fine.”

  John flipped the top open and waited for the password, which, oddly enough, he hadn’t been freaked out about.

  He tapped it in, smiling a little when it worked.

  “I give,” Galen said, settling down next to him and not going to watch TV at all. “What was his password?”

  “Chewbacca16.” John smiled a little dreamily. “My old bedroom was covered with Star Wars stuff—sometimes we’d get bored and count, you know? Three Anakin Skywalkers, three old Obi-Wans, seventeen Luke Skywalkers—between the sheets and the curtains and the action figures and the bookends—”

  “I take it you were Star Wars fans?” Galen asked dryly.

  John shrugged. “Sort of. See, my mom wanted everything in the bedroom to match, so she bought all Star Wars. Tory and me, when we turned about twelve, decided to see what the big deal was, so we actually watched the movies. Turned out we loved them, but given that my mom didn’t give a flying fuck whether I even knew what Star Wars was….”

  “Huh,” Galen said, nodding. “I could see how that could be a problem.”

  “Yeah, well, in the end we decided to love the movies and scrap the sheets and drapes, except by the time we were ready to do that, we got kicked out and had to live with Nana anyway.”

  Galen shook his head. “My mother,” he said after a moment, “drove to three different stores to get me matching Transformers sheets when I was in the third grade. I loved her for that. When I grew out of them in the fifth grade, I didn’t tell her. My father had to tell her, and he did it by buying me plain-colored sheets and curtains when I started junior high. It is funny how those things can shape us, right?”

  “Right. Well,” John murmured, “here we are. E-mail first or….”

  Because apparently Tory wasn’t trying to be sly. There was a series of videos shrunk down in the corner of the screen. John hit each one, from the oldest to the newest, and sighed.

  Home-made porn, each one, each one a different guy. They were labeled with the guy’s name and the price—apparently he had a sliding scale, John would assume based on the act he performed. Galen was special, because his hand jobs really had been gifts.

  But John couldn’t hold either of those things against them. They had been lonely. So lonely. John could relate.

  “Oh, hey, look,” he murmured. “This one is the obvious one, right?”

  “What’s that title?” Galen asked, clearly underwhelmed by Tory’s cleverness.

  “This is the End,” John said, grimacing. God. How bad was it going to be? “Okay, Tory, let’s see what the end was.”

  Two boys in a bedroom. God, wasn’t that how 80 percent of John’s porn scenes started? Two boys in a bedroom? In this case, it was two boys sitting on kitchen stools in front of the mattress on the floor. It was apparently a month, at least, before Tory’s complete disintegration, though, because although there was some drug paraphernalia on the end table—razor, mirror, spoon, lighter, black leather strap—there was nowhere near the level of decay and excess John waded through.

  So at this point it was just a bedroom. And one of the boys really was a boy. And the other was an older man.

  Well, no. Not an older man. Just Tory.

  He’d aged enough in the past ten years for it to be a shock. His face was leaner, all cheekbones and chin, and the lines that bracketed his mouth and his eyes were etched deep, in acid. No gray in his hair, but then, it was a little blacker than natural too.

  His eyes were no longer huge and limpid. Somewhere in that time, they’d narrowed, and his lips, once full and soft, had developed a cynical twist.

  He sat shirtless, wearing a pair of leather pants and a leather halter—shocker, after seeing his closet—and his skin was tanned to a deep, dark brown. If he’d lived to be forty, it would have been leathery, but now it was just dark. Almost sinfully so. He finished setting up the computer and the camera, and John watched him looking at himself with a lip curl, the self-hatred evident.

  “Okay, then,” he said, his voice deeper than John remembered, his Florida accent more pronounced. “So this is… what’s your name, kid?”

  “Sherman,” the kid said. John grimaced painfully. The kid was all skin and bones, with a little tummy, probably from too much soda. He wasn’t a green-eyed redhead, but he had lots of brown freckles on his nose and across his cheeks, and probably on his shoulders underneath the pastel green polo shirt as well. He had stringy brown hair and big brown eyes—as big and as limpid as Tory’s had been when he was a child.

  “O-kay,” Tory said, obviously struggling not to laugh. “So this is Sherman, and he wants to lose his virginity today. Isn’t that right, Sherm?”

  “Oh God,” John muttered. Galen winced next to him. The milk-money gig. Whores talked about it, but Jesus, it was awful to see on the screen.

  “Y-y-y-es sir,” Sherman stuttered, looking at Tory like he was the second coming. “I, uhm….”

  Tory sighed, an almost paternal sigh, and gauged Sherman judiciously. “Okay, kid. How about you tell me why we’re here. Why me? Why not someone you care about?”

  Sherman looked down, looked sideways. “He didn’t want me,” he muttered.

  John’s heart broke just a little.

  Tory shook his head. “So that’s just it, kid? You’re going to give it up to a stripper because you struck out once?”

  “I… I’m paying you….” The kid trembled, and then seemed to remember that wasn’t good manners to remind a person.

  Tory wasn’t fazed, though. Well, he and John had pretty much accepted the role of whores in junior high, hadn’t they? “Yeah, you are. I just want to know why. You’re not a bad-looking kid, really. I mean, a little conditioning, some light sun, you’d be a looker. Why take that one guy’s no and come pay a whore?”

  If the kid had been embarrassed before, he was positively mortified now. “I… I mean… it just… it hurt. I wanted it to be over—”

  Tory grunted in frustration. “Look, kid, if you pay me three hundred to take your V-card, then that’s what it’s going to be worth, right? But if you lose it to someone special, well, you can’t put a price on it, can you?”

  “But what if it’s awful?” the kid countered. “I mean, God, better I’m out three hundred than I get laughed out of school and never get it up again!”

  Tory pulled his head back and smirked. He obviously liked this kid. “Well, that is a worst-case scenario. But you know, if you’re doing it with someone—” Tory stopped, and John remembered their first times—in particular the time John had topped, not the time Tory had hurt him. “Someone who’s at least a friend, you know. Someone who cares about you—even if it sucks the first time, it gets better.”

  The kid looked embarrassed for a moment and then rallied. “Well yeah, but then you’d be out of a job, right?”

  John started to like the kid too—sassy little bastard.

  “Right.” So much weighted that one syllable. “But… kid, I’m like… like loneliness’s last stand. I’m… I’m what a guy does when he runs out of options. You’re what, twenty?”

  “Eighteen—”

  “Oh Jesus—you’re barely legal, for starters. And I’m—” Old. Us
ed-up. At the end of my rope. John didn’t have to hear Tory say it. He’d felt that way often enough in the past five years. “I’m a whore. Prostitute. Paid cock—”

  “I’m just so fucking lonely,” the kid said, his voice choked.

  Tory stopped. His head drooped on his neck, and his dyed hair, heavy with product to keep it back, fell forward in stiff strands.

  “Okay, kid,” Tory murmured, his voice thick. “Come here.”

  He stood up and reached into his back pocket, but the kid didn’t see that. The kid was in Tory’s space, looking at him adoringly, eye to eye, because Tory wasn’t that tall. Tory crooked the finger of his free hand and tilted the boy’s chin up, then pulled him in for a sweet, tender kiss, the kind all boys dreamed about, the kind that the handsome prince gave to his stalwart knight in the movie they’d never made.

  With his camera-side hand, he reached around and cupped the kid’s ass through his Lee Wranglers and slid his hand into his back pocket.

  John and Galen saw the three neat, crisp bank-drawn bills slid back there, but the boy probably didn’t feel it. Not until the morning.

  Because in the meantime, he had better things to do.

  As porn went, it was shitty. Tory kissed the kid like he was the lost love of his life, touched him with tenderness, was as kind and gentle and quiet as anyone could wish. He brought the kid off in his mouth, then rimmed him until he was hard again, then condomed up and….

  John had needed to close his eyes because even from across the room, the kid’s face showed absolute adoration, absolute love, and then pleasure.

  When it was over, Tory kissed him once more, kindly, washed him up like a sweet lover would do, and held him until he fell asleep. Then Tory looked at the camera, directly into it, and shook his head.

  “I can’t do this anymore. John, I make these tapes thinking I’m going to send them to you, show you what you’re missing, prove to you that I’m as good as any of the other guys you film. But… this kid. I can’t pretend anymore that I didn’t do this to myself. I can’t pretend I’m not old and tired. And I keep dribbling poison into my body, a little at a time, telling myself that it’s like a drink after work. I’m done, John. I mean, I blamed you at first because my family—” He broke off and obviously decided he couldn’t talk about that. “I’m sorry. You thought too much of me, you know? I’m not sure if I’ve loved anyone in my life, but I know I came close with you.”

  The kid stirred in his arms, and Tory soothed him to sleep. Then he stood up, still naked, a lot hairier than John remembered and older in so many different ways, and closed the laptop with a snap.

  Galen and John were left with the silence and a blank computer screen.

  As gently as Tory had touched the boy, Galen reached out and shut the laptop.

  “I remember that boy,” Galen said. John looked at him, feeling numb and blank. “He… he came by a lot after that, but Tory never opened his door. For all I know….” Galen’s hand was warm and clammy on John’s shoulder. “I was… sleeping a lot,” he murmured. “No reason to stay awake. But he was probably hiding from the boy. I’m not sure if I blame him.”

  John swallowed, tried to put his feelings into perspective. “That was….” What? Awful? What did he expect? A gang rape and sex at gunpoint? Some sort of traumatic event? But then, what could have been more traumatic than to have your past slap you in the face and to realize you’d spent thirty-five years coming to this place of sex and drugs and nothing else?

  What could have been more traumatic than despair?

  “Enlightening,” John said at last. “Did we save any of Tory’s dime bags? Just curious. I mean, we didn’t flush them all down the—”

  Galen’s clap across the ear fucking hurt. John popped up, heart thundering with the adrenaline of being attacked.

  “What in the fuck!”

  “Stop it. Stop it. Because you haven’t taken a hit the whole time you’ve been here. That’s fifty days clean—do you think I’m not counting?”

  “I just….” John sat down abruptly, propped his elbows on the table, and ran his hands through his hair. “I’d just really love to not be here while this was going on in my head!”

  “Do you think I feel any different?” Galen snapped, and he was still standing, pacing painfully from one chair to the next. “Don’t you get it? That happened right next door. And then he just disappeared—dropped off the fucking map. I was in his phone—that’s how they knew to call me. I was the first person listed who wasn’t a drug dealer and wasn’t his family, who apparently—”

  “Didn’t want a fucking thing to do with him,” John finished, because they’d covered this. “Yeah. I get it. Where was his phone, anyway?”

  Galen grunted and levered himself slowly into the seat next to him, the one with the big silver box. Restlessly, he ran his finger over the tinfoil, and John looked up.

  “Are you going to tell me?”

  Galen met his eyes. “Are you ready for it? To know?”

  John considered the words seriously. “Where’s your oxy?”

  “If you make me flush three months’ worth of oxy down the toilet to keep you away from it, I’ll do it. Then I will knee you in the balls, because I’m an addict and in about two hours I will be an irrational motherfucker with no fucking goddamned drugs. So you make the choice, John. Are you going to make me flush my stash, or are you going to do this like a big boy?”

  John glared at him, torn and hurting, and thought for a moment about plowing his fist through Galen’s stupid, scowling face. He’d pushed himself up from the table even, his vision red, muscles trembling, when the chair wobbled in his sweating hand. He twitched his body, finding a way to fix the chair back where he needed it, and contorted his core so he didn’t wobble and fall.

  Which all forced him to take a deep breath and remember who the fuck he really was.

  “Yeah,” he said, to nothing. “Yeah, okay. I hear you.”

  “That’s good to know.”

  John couldn’t look at him, couldn’t actually deal with him right now. With hands that shook ever so, he removed the top of the silver box.

  The manila envelope lay on top, and he lifted that first. Underneath were the Christmas cards John had sent. They’d all been opened, every last one. Under the packet of cards were all the same video game cases he remembered, the discs inside loaded with Tory as a teenager, naked and beautiful and learning enough about sex to make it dirty. John wondered if he’d ever make himself watch them again, but he felt a little door in his heart close.

  No. No, he could not do that. He’d keep them in case he changed his mind, but what would it serve? He remembered those moments as though he’d been there watching, not just filming. In his mind, in his heart, those moments were his. Those tapes had never been made public. They’d only been for him and Tory. The first time he watched them now, as an adult, they would lose their charm, their innocence, and dammit, he and Tory had so little of that left.

  So really, the only thing he had to worry about was the envelope. Okay, then. Bring it on.

  The pictures had been blown up. As John looked at them spread out on Galen’s kitchen table, it took him a minute to figure out what he was looking for.

  They were taken from a bridge—the Sunshine Skyway, actually—and John looked at them curiously. The photographer was on a spot right at the beginning of the bridge, with the camera aimed at the middle. From that angle you could see the figure in black, with a dramatic black cape, standing on the edge of the bridge like a huge flapping bird.

  “Oh fuck,” John muttered, looking at the next in the sequence.

  Where the figure, caught in free fall, began to pull the “wings” around him. Which led to the next picture.

  Where those wings were even smaller, wrapping around the figure’s middle.

  And the next, almost at the bottom of the bridge, where the figure was tight, no wings, compact like a chrysalis, the butterfly back to a pupa, the pupa going back…
r />   Into the sea, to his maker.

  The last picture was of the bridge, the cars still continuing, the water as featureless as though that black butterfly had never been.

  John didn’t realize he was weeping until Galen sat heavily next to him and pulled John’s face into the crook of his neck.

  “Oh God,” John whispered. “Tory. I get it. You wanted to go back.”

  Back to before. They came out too soon, and the world was too painful. They ripped out of the tight wrappings of youth, not fed enough on love, not fed enough on security, to want to stay children anymore. They’d been so sure that the world, the adventurous bright world, would be far more accommodating, but it hadn’t been. It had been brutal, and Tory had spent the next seventeen years trying to get back.

  He was back.

  He was wrapped tight in death’s womb, waiting for another chance to emerge.

  Oh God. Oh Tory. I’m so sorry. I was part of that. I was part of that, and I survived and you didn’t, and I’ll never see you fly again.

  HE WAS unaware of how long he cried, but when he finally pulled away, feeling weak and headachy, Galen was shaking, so pale he was almost green.

  “Oh God,” John muttered. “God. Here. I’ll go get it. Don’t move. I’ll go get it.” He was not tempted, not even a little, as he shook out the little tablet into Galen’s palm and got him a long draught of water to follow it up.

  Galen’s shoulders, which had supported John through the worst part of the pain, slumped and melted almost before he’d stopped swallowing. Ah, God, psychology was a wonderful, awful thing. But John knew from bitter experience that the effects of withdrawal were very real, and that Galen would be wiped out from going for so long without.

  “C’mere, baby,” he said tenderly, his voice still clogged. “Let me take you to bed, okay?”

  “That never means what I want it to mean while I’m here,” Galen complained.

  John let out a little puff of air. “Yeah, well, tomorrow or the day after, we’ll get you back to Nana’s, and it will mean everything you want it to.”

  “I need to stay awake longer,” Galen muttered. “I am not that old, dammit!”