by Paul Russell
He always made us close our eyes and say the same prayer—though I’ve gone and totally forgotten what the words were.
But that was my experience praying, so I was pretty surprised when Earl was down on his knees before I knew it. “Hey,” I said, “don’t do that.”
“I want to pray for you,” he said. He was so insistent.
“It’s not going to do any good,” I told him. “Not for me or for you either.”
I’d stood up, I guess in surprise at seeing him go down like that. I stood there looking down at him—it’d make a pretty odd sight, the two of us, if somebody came along right then. “Dear Jesus,” he was saying, with his eyes shut tight and this look on his face like somebody was hurting him—that look Carlos used to like in porn magazines when some young guy’s getting it from behind. Only this was Earl, and he was praying. “Save this young man,” he said. “Let your might and forgiveness, oh Lord, release him from this hell of bondage.”
“Oh please,” I wanted to tell him. “If you really want to go releasing me, hand over the keys.” Not that I was particularly itching to escape from a place I pretty much thought I deserved to be in.
So I didn’t say anything, though I did have to wonder where he’d learned to pray like that. It didn’t sound anything like the Earl I knew. I guess I’ve tried to respect other people’s needs, whether it’s butt-fucking or praying, and I could see this was something Earl needed to do. And to do in front of me. Probably he’d been looking for somebody like me for a long time, ever since he started thinking those thoughts of his and getting turned on by them. I sort of admired him that he’d finally got up the nerve to try and save me—provided that’s really what he thought he was doing.
I wasn’t about to go along with it, though. From start to finish, the whole scene was more about him than it was about me anyway. Plus—it was a little embarrassing. For some reason what I kept thinking about through the whole thing was this restaurant we used to go to after church with my mom’s mom—I guess that makes her my grandmother, but I never thought about her that way. It had this huge catfish on the roof to advertise it, a really ugly thing with this pink underbelly and spots all over it like huge freckles, and that big gaping mouth and whiskers the size of straightened-out clothes hangers. It had this hungry look that could make you never want to eat again.
I’d think about Jonah, but what I thought it looked like now was Earl, and the hungry way those prayers were coming out of his mouth. How he was gasping to breathe out of his element.
“I’m not going to pray with you,’’ I told him. “I’ve got more respect for what I did than that.”
Earl was starting to realize this wasn’t going to work so well with me. He opened his eyes that’d been shut tight, and that gasping look went off his face.
Suddenly he seemed really hurt, like he’d tried to pick me up and I’d snubbed him. I knew that look from the bars. It all comes down to the same thing, I remember thinking—the same thing dressed up in a million different disguises.
Earl picked himself off the floor. His face was all red, and he was panting a little. I was sorry for him that this whole thing had backfired like it did.
“Don’t go worrying about me,” I told him. “I’ll be okay. Your kids’ll be okay. Nothing’s going to happen to them. You’re not going to do anything to them.”
He just stood and looked at me for a minute—in that instant I thought I could tell he hated me.
“Suit yourself,” he said.
“I’ve always tried to suit myself,” I told him. “It’s the only thing I ever had going for me.”
It must’ve broken whatever special thing Earl thought there was between us. He’s been by a couple of times since that day, and he’s not exactly unfriendly—but there’s this distance. Like he’s embarrassed at what happened. Or maybe it’s that he’s pissed he tried something and it didn’t work out.
Sometimes I have to wonder what Earl’s going to think when he reads all this stuff I’ve written down in here. Because, like it or not, he was the one who first put me up to it. He never asks me about it, but he knows these pages are piling up, and he must be curious to find out what they say.
I wonder, Was he really trying to save my soul like he said he was? Did he really think that was what he was doing?
I WISH I COULD SAY I’D FELT SOME TWINGE THE morning of that particular day, but I didn’t. I’d gotten so I didn’t even notice what was on the marquee of that movie theater I drove past all the time. I know some part of me always looked up there just to make sure, but I couldn’t actually have told you the names of any of the movies. It was just this force of habit.
My first thought was, There must be some kind of fire. Starting about a block from the theater, the sidewalk was suddenly full of people milling about, and there were blue police barricades set up to keep them from spilling into the street even though a fair number were in the street already. About ten police cars had pulled up with their lights flashing, and I was looking for smoke to be billowing from the building. Instead, what I saw was the marquee, and this thrill of sheer fright plunged right down to the bottom of my stomach. There it was—not even Carlos’s name but just the name of the movie, Boys of Life, which I knew at once had to be Carlos’s movie because that was a name he’d thought about calling The Gospel According to Sodom but then didn’t.
I was trying to take in about ten different things all at once. It wasn’t any fire that crowd of people was in the street because of—if there was any fire, it was the movie that was the fire. That’s why they were all there. I had this crazy thought—Carlos is here, he’s making some kind of big entrance, though I knew Carlos wasn’t the kind of person to make a big entrance anywhere. Then I thought—he finally went and released The Gospel starring me and Scott Farris, and everybody in Memphis knows it’s me and I’m dead.
But that passed in a flash, because I was starting to register all the signs people were carrying, these big handpainted signs almost the size of small billboards that it took five or six people to hoist aloft. WANTED FOR MURDER AND TORTURE OF CHILDREN read this one sign. MEMPHIANS FOR MORALITY said another, and another said ART IS NOT A LICENSE TO KILL.
There was every kind of person out there in that crowd—blacks and whites, fat women in pants suits, serious-looking men in business suits, a couple of winos who were along for the ride. There was even a bunch of children wearing cardboard haloes and linked together with this paper chain, and adults stood over them with a banner that read, CHILD ABUSE IS SOUL MURDER.
Carlos had made a lot of movies, and I figured he’d kept on making them after I left—but they never, at least during the time I was with him, raised this kind of stir. It was something he’d love, I thought, and I loved it too—all those moral Memphians taking to the streets. I felt proud of Carlos, whatever it was he’d gone and done to shake people up like that. Whatever balance it was he’d finally found some way to tip.
I parked the pickup in an empty parking lot across the street where a building really had burned a few weeks before, RE-OPENING SOON: WE’RE GETTING OFF OUR ASHES said a sign, which seemed a little optimistic since the building was nothing but a burned-out shell these days.
Some of the people had started holding hands and singing “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” They were swaying back and forth in a kind of chain that started to stretch across the street, until some policemen stepped in to force them back up onto the sidewalk. This fat woman with a big wooden cross tied by a leather thong around her neck kept calling out, with her hands cupped around her mouth, “Carlos Reichart, you repent! Carlos Reichart, you repent!” Like he could hear her or something.
It felt totally strange to hear Carlos’s name come out of that lady’s mouth. It was like something that might happen in the worst dream you could ever imagine having. Or maybe in one of Carlos’s movies.
“Carlos,” I said aloud in this normal tone of voice. I hadn’t said that name in years, and I kind of liked saying it alou
d like that on a sidewalk in midtown Memphis. So I kept on. I wandered around in the crowd a little, just saying “Carlos, Carlos, Carlos,” like I was some little kid who was lost and looking for him.
“Who’s Carlos Reichart?” I asked this black man in a three-piece suit. He had this huge gold watch chain hanging across his belly. I think maybe he was a preacher of some kind.
“Don’t you read the newspapers? Don’t you watch TV?” he asked.
Neither of those were things I ever did.
The blue police barricades were a funnel leading to the open front door of the theater, and people lined them on both sides. A few folks were going into the theater, and whenever they did, they hurried in with a police escort while people in the crowd yelled “Shame!” at them. One little man in a bow tie kept trying to give away Bibles to the people going in, and even though the police kept leading him away by the arm, in a minute he was right back where he had been and trying to hand them out like his life depended on it.
None of the people hurrying into the place took the Bibles, or even dared to look at the crowd that was shouting at them.
I had to see that movie. I knew that. It was because I was still crazy about Carlos and I thought about him all the time even though I was always telling myself I never thought about him and that was all in the past. It was like I’d drawn a tarpaulin over that heap of stuff that was my whole life back then, and I thought I’d made it go away—but if I lifted up even a little corner of that tarp, there it all still was, bright and crazy and alive as ever. I’m crazy about Carlos, I thought. I’m still crazy about him. Like it was some great discovery I’d just made when really I knew it all along and it was what had been killing me for years.
“Carlos,” I said one last time, and then I ran down that gauntlet of shouting people past the little man with the Bibles and the police barricades, right toward the theater entrance.
“Whoa,” this cop said in a really loud voice. He grabbed me by my T-shirt and held me there. “Where you think you’re going?” he asked me.
“The movie,” I told him. “Boys of Life. A Carlos Reichart movie.” It felt good to say that.
He just held me there. I could see the pores on his nose, how there were blackheads there he should pop.
“You sure?” His eyes were glaring at me.
“I’m sure,” I told him.
He held me a second more, and then he winked at me. It took me totally by surprise. “Good,” he said in this voice meant just for me to hear, and he sort of shoved me along toward the ticket booth.
Inside, the theater was about half full. Everybody there seemed really nervous—no wonder, considering what they’d gone through to get inside, and they were probably all trying to figure how they were going to get out now that they were in.
I was thrilled and scared and totally singing inside, my heart was beating like no tomorrow, and under my arms cold sweat kept dripping down. Where I was sitting, there weren’t any people around me, and even though I was dying to hear what they knew about all this, I couldn’t. All I could hear was this one pretentious man telling the woman next to him, about five different times, not to worry, it was all staged, he was sure of that. At first I thought he was talking about the crowd, but then I realized it was the movie he was talking about.
You idiot, I remember thinking to myself, there’s no such thing as staging in Carlos’s movies. What happens there, one way or another, it’s all definitely reality.
I also remember, as the lights went down, linking the fingers of my hands together, and unlinking them, and linking them again. Then the theater was totally dark and the movie started.
I felt like I was waiting to meet Carlos in person, even though I knew I wouldn’t even glimpse him. He’d never be in his own movie—the whole time I was with him, he never let anybody take a picture of him if he could help it.
At first you couldn’t tell what you were seeing—it was this close up that was so close up it wasn’t anything anymore. Then the camera pulled back a little and you saw it was somebody’s arm, and a knife, and the knife blade was moving along the arm so this seam of blood just opened up. It was like somebody peeling back a pair of lips, and out came this red blood which you knew was real. There wasn’t any way to fake it. It really was somebody slicing his arm open with a knife. The camera pulled back even more and you could see that person sitting on a rock in the middle of the desert.
Then I saw it was Carlos.
The camera circled around him very slowly, all the way around him. He was totally alone on that rock in the desert, barefoot, without a shirt, wearing just this beat-up pair of jeans. And that black headband he used to wear sometimes—to put pressure, he always said, on his brain. He was fixing a tourniquet, holding one end of the cloth in his teeth and pulling it tight, I guess so he could control the flow of blood from his arm. In front of him was a low table—sort of an easel—and the camera focused in on that. Carlos took a little paintbrush, the kind you use to paint model airplanes, and dipped it into the blood that was welling up along his arm. Then he started to write with the paintbrush on a big piece of paper that was spread out on the easel.
I watched him write out the whole thing in his own blood on that big sheet of paper there in front of him. The whole time he was still bleeding, probably getting faint. It was a race against time to see if he could finish writing that thing down before he passed out, and in fact the last part of the writing was very shaky and then he did pass out. He slumped down onto the easel, and the blood from his arm smeared across the paper, and then the easel fell over because of his weight on it and he crumpled to the ground.
The camera didn’t really seem to care about all this. It moved in and studied Carlos’s face for a while. His eyes were shut and his mouth hung open and a fly was crawling on his lower lip. It was like that camera wondered in this cool detached way who this man was, but it didn’t really care all that much whether he was alive anymore, or dead.
Then the picture faded to black and the rest of the movie started.
All of which was just agony to watch—it must’ve taken Carlos fifteen minutes to write what he wrote in his blood, very slowly, very carefully. Plus what he was writing was so horrible that you didn’t know whether or not to believe it, and at the same time you knew it must be true, because why would somebody write something like that in his own blood if it wasn’t true? But then when the rest of the movie started, there wasn’t time to think about that anymore. You just had to put it on hold to deal with later.
You see shots of the desert, sleepy little Mexican villages. It’s all peaceful-feeling. A tree, a donkey standing under it. This bright blue lizard sunning itself on a rock. It goes on and on. An old woman walking along bent over under a huge sack of something on her back. Some vultures are making lazy circles in the sky over something out there that must be dead or dying. I remember all these things completely vividly.
The regional governor—or maybe he’s some drug lord, or a Nazi war criminal who’s in hiding, or even a rabbi gone beserk—whoever he is, he’s collecting the most beautiful boys to take into his hacienda. He’s convinced the world’s coming to an end, but his hacienda’s going to be saved. An angel’s come to tell him this. They walk in the garden in a rainstorm, and they talk. These bells in the distance are ringing—all the bells in the village, plus goat bells and cow bells and the wind chimes that are hanging from the arches of the hacienda—so you can barely hear what the governor and the angel say to each other. Their voices come and go over the bells. The angel’s barefoot, dressed all in white and wearing a floppy straw hat like you’d think some young Mexican farmer would wear. He promises to help the governor, but he says God’s going to want some of the boys for his own. “You never know who God’s going to want,” he says. “That’s why the bells ring. God gets greedy whenever it rains on the earth.”
The governor is played by Carlos. It’s not Carlos’s voice—he dubbed it like he dubbed all his voices. But it’s Carlos�
��s body. I used to know that body better even than my own. I guess, after that first scene, I got over the shock of seeing him act in his own movie—not to say I wasn’t shocked from beginning to end by what I saw. But I accepted it. I told myself if he was finally in one of his own movies, then he was probably doing what he needed to do and he didn’t have any choice.
When the rainstorm’s over but the bells are still ringing, Carlos takes the angel by the hand and they make love in this beautiful bedroom in a big canopy bed with flowers and hundreds of candles burning and plaster statues that start bleeding for no reason—you just notice there’s blood running down a face or a hand where you’re sure there wasn’t any before.
It made me queasy to see Carlos and the angel undress each other like they did—these long quiet motions and the bells still ringing. I remember thinking what a great body that angel had, all smooth and hard like I liked bodies and the candles coloring his skin honey-colored. And it was nice, I also remember thinking, to see Verbena was still on board after all those years. At least I thought that bedroom was probably her doing.
I have to say—I was so nervous through all this, if somebody’d coughed or touched me on the shoulder in that theater I’d have died of a heart attack. Which might’ve been the best thing. It made me miserable to see all this, though I was getting a hard-on in spite of myself. Carlos looked older, his bald spot was bigger, and he had this flower tattoo around one of his nipples. It set him apart in some way from the Carlos I used to know, and I wondered if Rafe had anything to do with him getting that tattoo. Then there was his dick, sliding in and out of the angel’s butt—I squirmed to remember what it felt like having Carlos’s dick rooting around inside me like that, all the things it made me feel. But I couldn’t remember—I’d had too many dicks inside me since then, and then none for three years now, and all I was seeing on the movie screen in front of me was just a picture—it wasn’t real like that dick that had sent me places I’d never known you could go out there under the power lines that first time years ago when I was just the crazy needy kid I used to be.