The Perfume Burned His Eyes

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The Perfume Burned His Eyes Page 6

by Michael Imperioli


  “Just like the way he was stroking my body a few minutes before,” Veronica added.

  She went on to describe how Duchess began to tremble and breathe heavy and rapid, her tail wagging stiff and wild. And all the while Barry’s glazed eyes would be fixed on Veronica as she zipped her jeans and put on her shoes. She said it looked like Duchess would be Barry’s next lay as soon as she got paid and walked out the door.

  I told her I was surprised that despite the debauched scenario she described, she returned to do more business with the twisted freak.

  “When I write my book it’ll all be worth it. I may even say that Barry would bring the dog into our sexual encounter in some debauched Roman-emperor kind of way.”

  I told her I didn’t think there was any possibility of the Barry/Duchess romance being anything but debauched, and that it needed no embellishment at all if she wanted to include this tale of animal love in her collected stories of woe and misfortune.

  “Don’t diminish my truth.” It was something she said often, like a mantra or an adopted maxim that you’d write on a piece of paper and tape to the mirror. “Okay? Don’t diminish my truth.”

  “I’m not diminishing it at all. In fact, I’m encouraging you to stick to your truth, that your truth needs no dressing up or down, no manipulation necessary.” I said it with a slightly sarcastic inflection, a tone I regret to this day.

  “I told you when we first got to know each other that I’m a nigger of the world, I live outside of society, and I have no tolerance for anyone who judges me. Did you forget I said that?”

  “I’m not judging you at all.” I was lying. “I am judging Harry or Barry or Larry or whatever the dogfucker’s name is.”

  She stared at me cold and hard. “I can’t say for sure what he did to the dog, how far he went, and that’s not the point here. I never had a dog so I don’t have a context as to what is or isn’t normal and what lines if any were crossed. Maybe it was just me being uncomfortable and twisting what he did into something wrong and immoral.” She was defending the bastard. She wanted to make claim to the depravity as a trial she’d endured but at the same time she was downplaying the perversity to win the argument against me.

  “It’s not you, it’s him, and it’s not normal, it’s abuse, sexual abuse, and it takes a certain type of sick, psychopathic mind to commit sexual abuse. I had a dog, a female dog named Christmas, and the thought of fondling her never entered my mind, ever.”

  “Maybe you should have. Maybe it would have made you a more interesting human being.” The corners of her mouth were pinched downward in a way I’d never seen. It was like a Venetian carnival mask she took out solely for special festivals of indignation.

  We finally reached the entrance to the 59th Street subway station. She turned to me slowly and stared into my eyes. I thought it was a strange moment for her to want to kiss me.

  “You bore me.”

  I was right, a kiss was far from her intention.

  “You bore me.” Three words said flatly before she walked down the stairs and left me standing there feeling like a jilted husband. She had chosen a bestiality-bent ingrate over me. I had those odd soda-bubble butterflies in my gut, the kind I’d get as a little boy right before I’d start to cry. I did not want to be seventeen years old and crying on 60th Street in the middle of the afternoon. So I started spitting.

  I spat on the sidewalk like it was sick dogfucking Barry’s face and maybe even her face if she ever treated me this way again. No. I would never have the courage to do that to her. Never.

  I spit until the butterflies went away and I felt certain the tears were not going to come. I spit the whole way home.

  seventeen

  Whoever it was Lou was waiting for finally arrived. She was a short, wiry young woman with close-cropped but unevenly cut blond hair. Very similar in style to Lou’s. She wore a baggy black suit which gave the impression of a little kid playing dress-up with her father’s clothing. She smelled like booze, Old Spice, Doublemint gum (which she chewed nonstop), and cigarettes.

  Lou didn’t introduce us. I watched them greet each other and sipped my gin and tonic. The taste reminded me of something I couldn’t put my finger on.

  “Mona, Mona, Mona, Mona!” He kissed her on both cheeks with his lips pursed into a ridiculous tiny circle, then allowed her to slide into the booth next to him. He made it a point to always be in the outside seat.

  She settled onto the vinyl bench and started talking like she had just come back from a bathroom break and was resuming a conversation that had been going on for hours: “I’m not calling her back. She wants to be First Lady and put on airs, that’s fine for whoever, but don’t think I’m gonna kiss fucking ass. She forgets who brought her around in the first place.”

  Lou didn’t seem to be paying much attention to what she was saying. “Do you want a drink, Mona? Hey, Tim, get us another round.”

  This time he held up a handful of bills. He gave me a ten and shoved the rest into Mona’s right hand, which simultaneously passed a small fold of tinfoil into his left hand. Springing to life, he dashed to the bathroom and disappeared. Mona took Lou’s pack of Marlboros and all the coins he’d left on the table. She stuck them in the big pockets of her suit jacket and sealed herself into the phone booth. I finished my drink and went to the bar to order another round. I felt high and happy and wanted a cigarette even though I wasn’t a smoker. The alcohol buzzed me enough courage to ask a leathery-skinned man with a fallen face for a cigarette. He looked at me sideways as he sipped something brown from a small glass. Then he slid his pack of Benson & Hedges toward me.

  “Here ya go, champ.” Champ was much better than Tim. He seemed happy to offer me the smoke and insisted on lighting it for me. I sucked it hard as the flame ignited the paper and tobacco. A big draft of smoke filled my throat and lungs. I was suffocating as I tried to hold it in, and then I let it all out in a fit of coughs, hacks, and gags.

  “Easy does it, buckaroo.” From deep in his throat came a long, wheezy, and phlegmy laugh. I kept on coughing and retching and must have turned green. The more I choked, the more he laughed. The bartender joined in the hilarity as he chuckled his way over to me with three gin and tonics. When I regained my composure, I handed the cigarette back to its original owner, who raised both hands over his head like I was mugging him at gunpoint.

  “I don’t want it. Why don’t you save it for a rainy day.” Another thick mucous laugh followed. “Maybe when you get a little hair on your balls.”

  I had gone from champ to buckaroo to prepubescent. I killed the cigarette, smothering the life out of it, and grabbed the drinks.

  When I returned to the booth, Mona and Lou were nowhere to be found. The phone booth was empty and I was alone. “Duke of Earl” began playing on the jukebox: “Duke, Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl, Earl, Earl, Duke of Earl, Earl, Earl, Duke of Earl . . .” It was not my selection but I wished I could take the credit. For it was brilliant: yes, the song of course, but the choice of it in that very instant equally genius and in perfect harmony with the time, the place, the mood, the lights, the musty stench of the bar in its melancholic, intoxicated East Side afternoon. It was Lou’s choice. Had to be.

  I figured they were both in the bathroom, which distressed me because I felt like maybe I was going to puke. The smoke, tar, and nicotine weren’t sitting right with the gin. I was a rank amateur when it came to drugs, booze, sex, cigarettes, and rock and roll. This was not to remain the case for much longer, I thought, as I started on the second gin and tonic of my life. I took a big slug. It went down smooth and easy and seemed to have a positive effect on the nausea. “Duke of Earl” began to take me back to my father’s black Cadillac speeding along the Westside Highway near the George Washington Bridge, on our way home from his uncle Otto’s house in Fort Lee, New Jersey. Me riding shotgun with no seat belt, the car reeking of Optimo Cigarillos and the lights of the city having just come up as the summer sun went down.

  I wasn’t
going to puke after all. I started to feel good and buzzed. Excited at the evening and the city, both open and unwritten before me. I was hoping Lou would emerge from the bathroom and take me to his next destination: another dive bar or some strange apartment where we’d continue our adventures together.

  Mona came out of the bathroom, walking right past me and the drink I had waiting for her. Her head and limbs were moving like she was in a heated conversation with someone, but no words or sounds came out of her mouth. I watched her back as she walked out the front door and onto East 61st Street. “Duke of Earl” ended. I drained drink number two.

  I think Frank Sinatra came on the juke next but I’m not positive. It could have been someone else. I don’t know much about Sinatra and his music. I started to drink Mona’s cocktail. Halfway into the song and still no sign of Lou. He had been gone long enough that it started to worry me, but I was afraid to go into the bathroom to look for him. I was pretty sure his long absence had something to do with the folded tinfoil that Mona gave him but I had no idea what that really meant or what I would find him doing in there.

  I waited for Sinatra or whoever to finish and then the Allman Brothers started playing. A short, stout, redheaded guy with a beard started grooving to the music as he perched on his barstool. It was a long song and I finished Mona’s drink as the extended and boring instrumental break went on and on. That made three gin and tonics gone down my hatch. My body started to feel heavy. I became hyperaware of how I moved my arms and how the weight of my body would redistribute itself every time I shifted in my seat.

  When the Allman song was finished there was a long silence in the bar. It was a menacing and unsettling quiet. No music, no talking, only the clinking of bottles as the bartender restocked beer. Creepy. Like the lights had come up at closing time and revealed the depths of all our misery and loneliness. I was hit with a big wave of sadness which lingered for a few minutes until I was hit with an even bigger wave of terror. I was convinced Lou would never come out of the bathroom. That he was dead; an overdose, and I was somehow responsible. I was an accessory to suicide which meant murder since another person was involved: me. I would never return home and would spend the next few decades in prison.

  Elton John broke the silence with his “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.” This was unbearable. The Yellow Brick Road was my life as I had known it up until now, but it was time to say goodbye. Things would never be the same again. My life was over and maybe it would be better if I made sure of it by jumping off the 59th Street Bridge. Death was preferable to life in prison, and the bridge was only a few blocks away.

  eighteen

  Two weeks after the Barry Dogfucker incident, Veronica officially summoned me out of exile. There was a seldom-used back door near the southwest corner of our school. It opened onto a filthy alley where rats scurried and people pissed. I used it daily as a means of avoiding as many of my fellow students as possible.

  Veronica was waiting for me in the alley wearing white-framed sunglasses. She was standing there with her arms folded, smirking like she knew the exact second I would be walking through the door.

  “Do you have any desire to redeem yourself?”

  It was the first sentence she had spoken to me in fifteen days. I didn’t miss a beat and immediately said yes. It would be one of the great mistakes of my life and something I’m sure I will regret till the grave.

  We took the subway downtown to Astor Place and wound our way through the East Village streets. We finally came to a stop at a small storefront on East 4th, 5th, or 6th Street. Somewhere near First Avenue or Avenue A.

  “This is just to prove to you that what I said before is true and to remove any doubts you may have about me. I want all of that cleared out of the way before we go any further.”

  We entered the little store. It was a narrow strip of a shop that sold occult books and objects used for rituals, rites, and spells. A store that catered to practitioners of witchcraft, Wicca, Satan worship, black magic, white magic, voodoo, Santeria, and I think maybe even Buddhism or Hinduism.

  The aromas of burned hair, pine trees, clove, roses, and tobacco hung in the air. Air that had grown thick from years of desperate aspirations: some fulfilled, some fruitless, most of them malicious. It took more than the usual effort to move my body in its normal fashion; I experienced an underwater, heavy gravity feeling and grew light-headed. I was also afraid, fearful of falling under the negative and dark influences that through osmosis had permeated everything I laid eyes upon, including the stained wall, dirty floor, and cobwebbed ceiling.

  There was a large glass case that displayed a variety of ritual robes, garments, hoods, and hats. Their colors, shapes, and insignias blasphemous and sacrilegious, in deliberate perversions of Christian and Jewish traditions. On a shelf were a selection of idols made in the different images of Satan, above which were a row of crosses nailed into place upside down.

  On the walls there were painted astrological and occult symbols, mostly in black or red, and framed pictures, drawings, and charts of names, glyphs, spell recipes, and images of unknown dark saints.

  There were lots and lots of candles of every size, color, and shape, the majority black and phallic, rendered in obscene dimension and detail.

  Veronica casually told me that her aunt Myra was the owner of the shop. Myra inherited it from her master who had passed on five years ago. The one person working behind the counter was a small woman with mousy brown hair and tortoiseshell glasses. She presented no outer appearance of witch or satanist and showed no recognition of Veronica. She ignored us and was engrossed in the latest issue of Rolling Stone magazine, which featured Donny Osmond on its cover.

  Veronica pulled a slim book off a shelf. She held it between her hands for a few seconds and closed her eyes. Then she handed it to me. The soft slick covers both front and rear were all black except for four or five Latin-seeming words. She put her hands over mine and pressed them all together with the book in the center of the sandwich.

  “Can you feel its power?”

  I tried to but I didn’t. I didn’t feel anything at all emanating from the book. Besides the heavy atmospheric pressure in the store, the only power I felt came from her and her alone—a magnetic polar pull and centrifugal force that I was helpless against. I held the book tightly, closed my eyes, and pretended to feel whatever it was she wanted me to feel. She laughed, took it from my hands, and put it back on the shelf.

  “I want to buy you a gift. Is that okay?” she asked.

  Anything was okay. Whatever she did, whatever she would ask of me, wherever she wanted to go, I was at her mercy. And though I was scared shitless in the narrow confines of the hellish little shop, it was still heaven to be by her side.

  I wanted to hold her hand but was afraid of fucking things up. She hadn’t looked in my direction for over two weeks and I didn’t want to upset the delicate balance required to remain in her favor. I followed her to a long glass case that displayed an array of rings, pendants, amulets, crystals, bracelets, wands, and scepters. Some of the items looked like they were very expensive, made of gold or silver, and adorned with precious-looking stones and jewels.

  “I want you to wait for me outside.”

  “Okay.” I left without asking why. I tried to peek through the window but the heavy black curtains didn’t leave any crack for me to see what she was doing.

  She emerged smiling after a few minutes and extended a little black box toward me. “For you.”

  Inside the box was a small silver runic symbol attached to a fine metal chain. It had the shape of a capital Y but the bottom line extended all the way up, bisecting the v at the top and forming an upward-pointing trident.

  She called it an Algiz and said it was a shield of protection that warded off evil. It also gave its wearer the ability to “channel one’s energies appropriately,” but she did not elaborate on what that meant or how I would go about doing so.

  I wanted to ask her what she thought I needed prote
ction from or what specific evil was being warded off, but all I could muster was “Thank you” as she fastened the clasp behind my neck. She then showed me the exact same symbol hanging from her own neck. I had never noticed it on her before.

  “A very special person gave me mine. By giving you yours, I extend the chain of connection.”

  “A very special person gave me mine too.” I meant it sincerely.

  Her thoughtfulness and care opened something in me. As we walked toward Second Avenue my thoughts began to speed up. But instead of anxiety and confusion, my mind was infused with sharpness and clarity. Thoughts were coming fast but I was able to see them and digest them one by one as they passed through my mind. It was like I was decoding the mysterious logic that made one thought lead to and give way to the next, the mechanism behind my mind revealing itself for the first time in my life.

  Everything made sense—the shape of her eyes and the lines of mascara around it were perfect cosmic geometry. The molecules that made up her scarf vibrated at the right speed and frequency to create the only color that could possibly express who she was at this very moment. The deep violet fabric twisted around her long neck, not slack and not tight—just how it should be. Exactly where it belonged. Just like me.

  nineteen

  I stood up and it felt like I was on a boat. I took a deep breath. My legs felt like they were sinking into thick, sucking mud. I had to take each step with care and precision to avoid falling flat on my face. Walking to the bathroom must have taken me fifteen minutes at the pace I was going. It didn’t really matter at that point; once I confirmed my friend’s death, I was heading to the bridge.

  The door to the bathroom was unlocked so I pushed it open. There was a small sink beneath a broken mirror to my left and a low urinal just beyond. At the rear was a single toilet stall, its heavy black door closed. I could see Lou’s boots in the gap between the bottom of the door and the floor. The way the boots were situated made me think he was standing up and facing the rear wall; I took that as a good sign.

 

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