Cannibals in Love

by Mike Roberts

  As the lady nurse walked away to catalog the next catastrophe, I stood up. Trying to affect casualness, I walked across the length of the waiting room, past her empty desk. Past the Puerto Rican kid with the leg. Out the automatic doors. Gone.

  Outside, the air had prickers in it. This last chill right before the sun comes shooting up. I was buoyed by my escape. I could feel how drunk I was, even now, as I passed into a kind of giddiness. I had no idea where I was going, just that I must keep moving away from the hospital doors. I was consumed by this childlike fear that the lady nurse could come rushing out onto the sidewalk at any moment, pointing: Hey! There he is! Get him!

  It was a kindly old bum who finally told me where the stairs to the 6 train were. And from there it was pretty much clear sailing. Taking a seat and riding the empty train at the cusp of rush hour. I watched the car slowly fill as we trundled back downtown.

  It was daylight when I came up out of the subway, and I shielded my eyes against it. I was thrilled to have pulled off this little trick: finding the Thirteenth Precinct on the Island of Manhattan. Never once did I consider that it might be a trap. Some kind of dirty civic tangle where they get you paying at the hospital and the jail, both. The fact of the matter was I was still sort of shitfaced at 6:00 a.m., stinking horribly, and walking into a police station of my own volition.

  But inside all I found was another overtaxed waiting room. The smell of burnt coffee and the pulse of bureaucracy. It was not so far off from the OTB, save for the missing bay of televisions. I looked around warily for my friends the big cops, but I didn’t see them anywhere. I walked up to the desk and passed over my handwritten instructions, like this counter was some sort of coat check.

  The desk cop read my note with a blank face, seeming to miss the humor in it. He told me to have a seat as he passed it backward to a second cop, who also read it, before turning away and disappearing through a door. I busied myself watching the room, thinking it strange that I didn’t see anything like the wheels of justice in motion here. Nobody looked particularly criminal, at least. No one seemed worried about much of anything.

  And then, without further ado, a different door opened, and a third cop came wheeling out into the waiting room with my bike, calling, LeMond.

  “LeMond? Guy LeMond?” They had written down the brand name off the side of the bicycle. “Ho, listen up, which one a youse is LeMond?”

  I jumped up, waving at him. I couldn’t believe my own stupid luck. “I’m LeMond. Me. Greg LeMond. It’s Greg LeMond.” I couldn’t wipe the smile off my face as the cop handed back my bike, totally indifferent.

  “All right, there ya go, Greg.”

  I hurried the bike up the stairs and out onto the street, and I suddenly felt incredible. My whole body was buzzing, almost vibrating. I wasn’t even tired anymore. Gliding out into the morning traffic, weaving through the cars, some part of me just wanted to keep on riding. I thought about going straight in to work, just the way I was, but decided to sleep and quit instead. They liked me enough at the temp agency to find me something else.

  I rode across the Brooklyn Bridge, taking this long route home. Past the joggers, and the dog-walkers, and the women pushing strollers. I was happy to be young, happy to be alive on this morning. Happy, even, to be living in New York City. I laughed out loud. There was no fucking way I was paying for that ambulance ride. Let them come after me now. I was set free.

  YOKO

  It all began with a robbery. This bizarro crime, executed in broad daylight, and reeking of junkie panic and ingenuity. This was the first time I met Lane Tworek. He knocked on my door to ask if I’d seen anyone breaking into his house. The way Lane described it, there was a thirty-foot ladder in his roommate’s bedroom, while his own bed was out in the backyard.

  “I’m sorry. What?” I tried to ask.

  Lane figured some junkie had found the ladder lying out and carried it up the block, looking for an open window. After climbing into Lane’s house, he pulled it up after him, so as not to draw undue suspicion. Then the guy just ransacked the place a little; taking CDs, and DVDs, and even Lane’s PlayStation. All of which would’ve been a bummer on its own, except that he ended up finding the only thing in the whole house worth stealing: an envelope full of cash. This, Lane explained, was the rent money.

  “You pay your rent in cash?” I asked incredulously.

  “I pay everything in cash, dude.”

  Lane, I would come to learn, was more or less officially in arrears: barred from the world of credit cards and checking accounts. But the story wasn’t done yet. Lane figured the junkie just about shit himself when he found the rent money. It’s a wonder he even bothered taking the Butthole Surfers tapes, but the poor guy was probably in shock. It was time to get out of there, to go. Quick. Now.

  Except that when he went downstairs he found out he was locked inside the house. We were all living in these beautiful, shambling rowhouses in a gentrifying Columbia Heights, where all the doors and windows had bars on them. Sure, he could’ve put the ladder back out the front window, but frankly, that would’ve been stupid. And, yeah, he could’ve dragged it to the back of the house and tried his luck there, but Lane figured all that money was making him light in the head. Either that or he’d lost his nerve for heights, which seemed unlikely given the fact of where Lane found his mattress in the backyard.

  “You mean he threw your bed off the top porch and jumped?”

  “That’s exactly what he did. That motherfucker.” Lane shook his head. “You really didn’t see any of this?”

  “Unh-uh.” I smiled. “I wish.”

  * * *

  Lane and I pulled back the fence between our yards, and I helped him carry his bed back up the stairs. We leaned over the balcony and marveled at the fact that a man with a thousand dollars in his pocket had jumped two stories, and no one even saw it.

  “Should we try it?” I asked.

  Lane nodded solemnly. “We have to.”

  We pulled the mattress back onto the porch and hucked it over the railing, watching it bounce and settle in the bare yard. I got excited then, right on the verge of losing my nerve. But Lane wasn’t one to wait around and think about these things.

  “Well…” He put his leg over the railing and threw himself off. Bang! Lane hit the mattress hard, right on his ass. He shot back into the air and nearly landed it, before crashing into the dirt. Lane got up wincing and smiling as he rubbed his tailbone.

  “Case-fucking-closed, man!” he hollered up at me. “Go ahead.”

  Lane was shielding his eyes against the sun and grinning up at me expectantly. Obviously I didn’t have a great feeling about this jump, but not jumping now was impossible. So I took a breath and I just did it. Windmilling my arms, I reached back underneath me and almost missed the thing. The impact of the mattress was jarring, and I smashed my arm into the ground underneath me as I sprang back up, nearly drop-kicking Lane. We got up laughing too hard to speak, and I shook out my wrist, which was already throbbing and vibrating heat.

  This was the way that Lane and I baptized our friendship in danger.

  * * *

  I had been going through a pretty good run of invincibility. For all I knew, I was indestructible. And besides, I was having real fun again. I was surprised how little my wrist actually bothered me. It puffed up and went back down, and eventually it was just a dull ache. If anything, it was a reason to go twice as hard.

  Lane convinced me to take the next week off from work to help him build a nine-hole miniature golf course in his backyard. As Lane explained it, each hole would represent a different cataclysm of recent American history: 9/11; Waco; Oklahoma City; Exxon Valdez; the Challenger explosion; Ruby Ridge; Mount St. Helens; Columbine; and Super Bowl XXV (this last one was my own). Lane was enrolled in art school, and the whole thing was presented loosely as his thesis project. He’d even received a grant, which he promptly spent on Astroturf, lumber, and marijuana. Somehow he’d managed to get the rent paid out o
f this as well.

  I was surprised to find that Lane was a competent builder. Not only that, but he ended up having all kinds of practical knowledge: carpentry; electricity; plumbing; cooking. I made a point of trying to soak up as much of this as I could, because it was all completely foreign to me. If something broke in my father’s house, he called a guy to fix it. I’d always thought that was smart.

  Each morning, Lane and I would drag the power tools out of the basement. We’d take our shirts off and smoke pot out of an apple, and go to work. Unfortunately, we only really managed to finish three holes before giving over to the greater desire to play the course. We were getting good, too, and began tossing around the idea of playing for money. But this was right when Lane’s landlady found out what was going on, and threatened to have us arrested. She came roaring into the backyard one day, in her high heels and sunglasses, screaming at me about tearing the thing down. I didn’t even know who she was. I was so high I could hardly keep myself from giggling. Covered in dirt and paint, I just stood there, holding my putter, letting her yell.

  After that, Lane was stuck with a shit-ton of Astroturf. We laid as much as we could down for carpeting, and put the rest out to the curb.

  * * *

  There was a bar in the neighborhood that Lane and I liked to walk to most nights. We would show up with six beers in a backpack, and leave with three rolls of toilet paper lifted from the bathroom. We spent a lot of time in this bar thinking up new ideas for bands to start. Lane was convinced he could build us some contraption whereby we would pedal stationary bicycles attached to belts that controlled the speed and pitch of different record players and strobe lights. I would laugh because he was serious. He assured me he could get us a grant and everything. Lane would make the pretty bartender find him a pen so that he could sketch the whole thing out on a napkin.

  “It looks like it’s falling apart,” she told him.

  “That doesn’t matter. We don’t have any songs. It would only have to hold together for five minutes,” Lane said. “Besides, it’s art.”

  * * *

  Lane Tworek was exactly the bad influence I’d been searching for all along. He was a brutal kid, which was the thing I liked about him most. I had no idea what Lane could be thinking from one moment to the next, and I loved that about him.

  He seemed to have no conception of himself as strange, either, which I found fascinating. I would catch him at things I couldn’t even imagine. All these weird and compromised situations that Lane got into, just being himself. Everyone was using Craigslist by now—for jobs and apartments and bike parts—but Lane was already using it to look for sex. He would post ads with headings like: “Average Joe Seeks Blowjob From Hot-Model Type.” Hello! the post would begin cheerily. I will be walking home from the Raven Tavern at 2:30 a.m., and I would appreciate your company for some pre-slumber fellatio …

  I almost pissed myself when I saw these. I couldn’t tell if this was real, or just another idea for his thesis. Lane could be very deadpan that way. But I couldn’t get enough of it. I would wipe the tears from the corners of my eyes and make him post another one. “College Student Interested in Dating Your Sex Doll.”

  “Does anyone ever reply?” I finally asked.

  “Oh, yeah.” Lane smiled. “Always dudes.”

  “Really?” I could hear myself sounding disappointed.

  “Yeah. It’s great, though. They’re all very confident in their ability to convert me into a homosexual.” Lane grinned. “I guess you never know, right?”

  The truth, I found out, was that Lane had actually had a number of real sex encounters with older women through the Internet. I knew, for instance, that he’d been conducting a semi-regular affair with some friendly hausfrau out on Connecticut Avenue for over a year. The whole thing made me feel a little puritan by comparison.

  Still, it took me a while to realize that Lane was actually making money on his computer. More often than not, this was where I’d find him. Up in his bedroom with his laptop open.

  “What do you know about baseball gloves?” he would ask me with a blank face.

  “Baseball gloves?” I’d ask back.

  Lane would kick open a box filled with a dozen lightly used mitts. “Yeah, how much can I sell a baseball glove for, anyway?”

  I picked one out of the box and tried it on. Punching my fist into the sweet spot. “Sell it how?”

  “eBay, dude,” he said with a laugh, like it couldn’t be more obvious. We were eternally having some variation on this same conversation. Small electronics, jewelry, taxidermy, whatever. Lane was always coming home with a new box, and he always wanted to know how much I thought a thing was worth, for some reason.

  “Dig around. I got some Ozzie Smiths in there. Pretty good, huh?” He was staring at me, waiting for me to put a number on it.

  “Twenty bucks?”

  Lane would always nod, pleased. Turning back to his computer and typing it in.

  “Where do all these things come from, Lane?” I finally asked him one day.

  “Hey…” he said, not answering my question. “Have I ever shown you all the pictures that Internet people have sent to me?”

  I shook my head, and watched as Lane opened a file filled with thumbnails of men and women, in all shapes and sizes. This gross tapestry of flesh and hair and blurry naked parts. He smiled at me wickedly, and closed the laptop, as I tried to lean in.

  Lane stood up and kicked the box of baseball gloves closed, too. It was more fun not knowing where this stuff came from anyway.

  * * *

  This was still at the very beginning of the Cicada Summer. Those dozy heat bugs had just begun emerging from their seventeen-year slumber to take over the city like a biblical plague. Thousands of nymphs crawling up out of the ground and taking flight. They served no purpose at all, buzzing and smashing into everything like little balsa-wood gliders with rubber-band propellers. The cicadas carried along the strange energy of a long hibernation come to an end. Singing into the night: sex and death.

  Lane wouldn’t stop telling me that cicadas were a delicacy in China, either. For days he had been urging me to eat a live one for his own personal entertainment. We were deep into a culture of dares at this point.

  Finally I told him I would eat a cicada if he would eat a cockroach.

  “Fine,” Lane said, and we stood there, unsure how to proceed.

  The cicadas were everywhere, and I plucked one out of the air without even trying. It buzzed and beat its wings against my fingertips as I held it out to Lane tauntingly. He was annoyed because there were no cockroaches out in the broad daylight. I was determined to eat my prehistoric bug before he could even find his.

  And I did, too. Breaking the insect into death with my back teeth. Grinding it down to a sticky stillness. Its wings and legs scraped along my tongue as I fought my gag reflex. I swallowed it whole, in one terrible lump, grinning at Lane. Showing him my blackened tongue. It wasn’t even that bad, really. I’d read in the newspaper that the only thing a cicada eats is leaves. Besides, it was over now.

  “Mmm, done, finished. Delicious. What are you waiting for, Lane?”

  Lane was down on his knees, under the front porch, getting frustrated. It took a minute, but he finally came out with a big black-brown cockroach. Holding it up for me.

  “That thing looks repulsive,” I told him, grinning wildly. “Cockroaches are not a delicacy anywhere. I just want you to be fully aware of that. A real friend would stop you now. He would report you to the Board of Health. For your own good.”

  “Watch and learn,” Lane said.

  He popped the roach into his mouth, and I could see right away that this was not good. Whatever unholy shit is on the inside of a cockroach, it had just come spilling out into Lane’s mouth. His face went into a kind of contortion, and I was killing myself laughing. This was a truly beautiful thing. Lane kept chewing and chewing, but as he worked to swallow his body said no. He gagged loudly and retched the mashed bu
g out onto the sidewalk in a pulp.

  “Ugghhh,” I said, truly exhilarated. Lane looked green. I had never seen him this way before. “C’mon, pussy. Finish it!”

  The insect’s legs were still twitching inside the black slop. Lane showed me his teeth as he picked up the roach in his fingers again. Steely, he put it back into his mouth and swallowed it whole. Gone.

  “There,” he said, looking miserable. “Happy?”

  “Verrrry happy,” I said, with a shit-eating smile.

  “I think I need something else,” Lane said, examining the inside of his mouth with his tongue. Spitting black saliva onto the sidewalk. “I’m not sure. Malt liquor?”

  “Okay,” I said. “Let’s go get you a Sparks, little guy.” I put my arm around his shoulder and we walked down to the bodega.

  * * *

  I was really very happy with everything then. This can’t be overstated: I was enormously, perfectly happy. In a lot of ways this was turning into the best summer of my life. So, of course, this was the exact moment when Lauren Pinkerton came back around looking for me. She wanted to be my friend again. She wanted to know where I’d gone, and why I seemed so happy now. She wanted in, all of a sudden, out of the blue!

  “Well, ha-ha-ha,” I said, from up on the porch.

  “I’m serious. Why can’t we be friends? I miss you, don’t you miss me?”

  “I was ignoring you, if you were paying any attention.”

  Lauren pouted, and I tilted my head toward her sentimentally, mockingly.

  “What’s wrong with your arm anyway?” she asked, pointing up at me from the sidewalk. I looked at my left wrist, which was still wrapped in duct tape from earlier in the afternoon, when Lane and I had been playing guitars in his basement.

  “Nothing’s wrong. I have two of them,” I said, showing it for a fact. “Everything’s hunky-dory.” The truth was it had been nearly four weeks since I’d jumped off the upstairs porch with Lane, and I’d decided to stop asking those kinds of questions.