Boys of Life

by Paul Russell

  “You’re right,” I said. “I fucking went and got the hell out. I got married, Carlos. I moved to Memphis and I work in a lumberyard and I love my wife.”

  “And look what happened,” Carlos said in this quiet voice. We both sort of stopped there on the street and I just looked at him. We’d reached that point we both knew we had to reach.

  I took this breath, and felt all queasy inside. “How did it happen?” I asked him.

  “You’ve got a right to know,” he told me. We were walking again—it was just this brief pause where we couldn’t move.

  “I have to know,” I told him, “one way or another.”

  “It happened,” he said, “like some bad movie. It happened like a story out of the Bible. There was a knock on the door—literally. One day there was a knock on the door and I opened it and there you were, only it wasn’t you, it was Ted. He’d come looking for you. Or I should say, he’d come to New York and he had a postcard he said you’d sent him once, with the address of the apartment on it, and so he thought he should come look for you. And you have to admit, he came to the right place.

  “He was a little down on his luck, you might say. I don’t think Owen, Kentucky, quite prepared either of the Blair brothers for New York. He had that same dazed look you did when you first came here.”

  That dazed look was news to me.

  “You have to understand, Tony—I was good.” He said it almost like a cry. “I sent you away, I let you grow up. I did that, and it was hard, but we both got through it, we were both fine. And then you just left me. One day you just weren’t there anymore.”

  I didn’t remind him how he was the one who dumped me. He seemed to have forgotten all that.

  “And then there’s this knock on the door,” he went on, “and here you are all over again. Standing there looking like an angel, and I thought, My God, if this is a test I’m lost. I can’t do it. I fail.”

  “So let me guess,” I accused him. “You offered to let him crash at your place for a while. Till he got on his feet. Then you put the moves on him, didn’t you? You put the same moves on him you put on me.”

  “It takes two to fuck, Tony. Even you know that.” It was a tone I remembered him taking with me now and again—sounding like he was disappointed in me for not figuring something out that was obvious to everybody else. I wasn’t letting him get away with it this time.

  “It takes two people for a rape too,” I said. “Or a murder. You had all the cards. Ted was just a kid.”

  “He was nearly twenty years old when he came to New York, Tony. You forget, in this country, you reach the magic age of eighteen and suddenly you’re an adult. Just one day, even one minute past the age of eighteen and you’re not a child anymore. And if you want to talk cards—we’ve all got cards, Tony. We’ve got different cards, and we put our different cards on the table. Haven’t you learned that yet? We put our different cards on the table and whatever comes up comes up.”

  “I’m not going to believe that,” I told him. We were both raising our voices. It was the kind of conversation you walk past in New York and wonder what’s going on. “I’m just not going to believe somebody like you who’s smart and famous and fifty years old and some kid who—maybe he’s twenty but he’s still a kid—doesn’t know anything about anything are going to have equal cards. You can try to get out of it all you want, but I’m not going to believe that one.”

  Carlos was raising his voice too. “You want to know who held all the cards?” he shouted at me. “The one thing you’re scared to death to know? You did, that’s who. Ted did. I never had anything. To be eighteen or sixteen or whatever, to be young and pretty and have a dick that works—in this country, that’s to have everything. Faggot, breeder, I don’t care what you are. That’s the way the whole thing’s set up, baby. It brings everything else to its knees.”

  I shook my head.

  “You’re still crazy,” I said. “You’re a crazy fucking lunatic, and you killed my brother.”

  The instant I said that, Carlos shoved me against the wall of the building we were walking past. He was wiry and strong, like he’d always been. “First of all,” he told me, talking right into my face, almost hissing, “nobody killed your brother. There’s nobody to blame it on. Get that through your head or you’re not going to understand anything. It was just something that happened, and he knew it could happen but that didn’t stop him from doing it. Your brother was a wise kid, Tony—he was the wisest, bravest person I ever knew. He took after you that way. He had this fantastic courage to live inside his body, and that’s what he did, right to the very end. I spent my whole life looking, but I never met anybody who let himself go so far with everything. He was a genius, Tony.”

  All this talk sounded totally crazy to me. It sounded like Carlos talking about Carlos and not about Ted. I couldn’t recognize my little brother in any of the stuff Carlos was saying.

  He went on, though.

  “You know what all my work was about—you were part of it, you even started to show me the way. But Ted—Ted just knew it from the inside out.”

  I had this sick feeling all at once—I remembered me and Scott in that warehouse in Brooklyn, and those kids in the abandoned church in the Bronx, and suddenly I thought I knew what Carlos was talking about. Carlos wouldn’t have known Ted without me. He wouldn’t’ve known what to do with him.

  “Are you trying to say I’m the one who killed him?” It was something I had to say, it was where everything was leading.

  Carlos went limp—he let go of me where he’d grabbed the neck of my T-shirt with both hands.

  “I’m sorry about Ted,” he said in this exhausted voice. “What happened to Ted was a terrible thing.”

  “What did happen, out there in the desert?”

  We were walking again—I guess because there wasn’t any use in just standing there, and Carlos seemed to have some deep energy that night that was moving him on, not letting him stop to reconsider. In Times Square some of the movies and plays were letting out. Milling all around us were tourists, Japanese businessmen, and the hustlers and prostitutes hanging out in doorways. xxx ALL MALE BURLESQUE said the marquees on the movie theaters we’d go to whenever we went on what Carlos used to joke were our dates.

  “Tell me where you saw Boys of Life. Where’d it finally track you down?”

  I had this insight. “You wanted it to track me down, didn’t you?”

  “That was the only reason,” Carlos said. “Otherwise I would’ve burned it.”

  A pretty kid in bright red sweatpants and a black T-shirt was leaning against a mailbox, saying in this quiet voice to everybody who was walking by, “Hundred bucks for the night, hundred bucks for the night.” He said it to us as we walked by, and I saw Carlos look him over out of the corner of his eye.

  “Memphis,” I said. “It tracked me down all the way to this little movie house in Memphis. And I had no idea—I just got to the end and everything blew up in my face.”

  “I’m sorry,” Carlos touched my arm. “I had to let you know, whatever the price was.”

  I didn’t tell him about the river. I didn’t think that was something he needed to know.

  “Everything I’ve ever done,” he went on, “it’s been for love. You understand that, don’t you? Wanting, having, giving up—it’s all been love.”

  “Don’t get off the point. Talk about Ted,” I commanded him.

  But all he said was, “Remember when you fist-fucked Scott Farris? Do you remember that?”

  I think I said earlier how Carlos never mentioned Scott after we finished that movie, like it was something we were both ashamed of.

  “I remember it,” I had to tell him.

  “Then tell me I’m not making this up. Tell me there wasn’t this instant when you had your fist up inside him and suddenly you realized there was nothing to stop you from going all the way on up, there was nothing to stop you from touching his heart, and pushing yourself all the way up inside him till
you disappeared into him, and then you’d be him, his skin would be your skin and his insides would be your insides and you’d be looking out at the world through the eyes in his skull.”

  It touched some kind of memory in me that made me nervous.

  “Carlos,” I told him, “you’re insane. That’s just insane talk.”

  “Think about it, Tony. Think how far you could really go with that if you dared. No more fear, no more shame, no more being alone. None of that mattering anymore. Think about finding somebody who was willing to go all the way with that.”

  “You’re talking about Ted,” I said.

  “I’m talking about Ted. I’m talking about being out in that desert with a group of people completely dedicated to the idea that they could push themselves beyond their physical and mental limitations. I’m talking about things we did in that desert nobody’s even imagined being able to do. A kind of trust, Tony, that’s like a white light.

  “Imagine this.” His voice was quivering, he was so caught up in what he was saying. “Imagine being buried alive. Building a coffin out of wood—you cut the trees down, you saw the boards, you nail the thing together. Then you take your shovel, and you dig a hole. Just for yourself. When you’ve got your hole dug, you gather your friends and you have a big feast. You eat all your favorite foods. You drink some wine. Then you lie down inside that coffin you made for yourself, and your friends nail the lid shut, and they lower you down into that hole and shovel dirt in on top of you. And you trust them to dig you back up in time. That kind of trust is absolute discipline. With that kind of trust, if you focused it enough, if you practiced—you could do anything. You could fly.”

  He looked at me with this look that killed me, this look of complete happiness. He said, “And we did, Tony. We flew. Out there in the desert, at night—we actually flew through the air.”

  I thought about what Verbena had said once about Carlos—so much belief, she’d said—and it was true. He could believe anything, almost enough to make those things he believed come true. It was frightening, it was wonderful—it was what completely took me about him the first time I met him, and I have to admit it almost took me now. I remembered that first day in the laundromat—how he stared at me, like he knew if he wanted me bad enough, and just focused on that want, then he’d get me. And he did. And that was the way he’d been living his life ever since.

  “That’s not the Ted who was my little brother,” I told Carlos flat out.

  Carlos sounded tired. “I knew Ted a lot better than you ever did,” he told me. “Maybe that hurts, but it’s true.”

  And it did hurt—because I knew when he said it how it was completely true. He’d taken Ted away from me. I’d shown him how he could do that, and he went and he did it.

  “We went and we went,” Carlos was saying. “Every day it was a little farther. I would’ve stopped—but Ted wanted to keep going. He had what you could call this cosmic sense of adventure. And so we just went. I guess we went so far we couldn’t find our way back. He wanted to die, Tony. He was ready to find out what it was like. But he was happy—your brother was very happy. There was this special light in him that went on shining to the very end, even there in that little hospital.”

  We’d reached the edge of Central Park. We plunged on ahead, and suddenly, that wonderful thing about Central Park—all the city just fell away. We were wandering in these big dark woods in the middle of the city, but the city was miles from us, another planet. Around us, in the bushes, I knew men were cruising for each other, hungry for something even AIDS wasn’t scaring them away from.

  A lot of things still didn’t make sense.

  “But why did you tell them you killed him down in Mexico, if now you’re saying you didn’t do it?”

  It wasn’t that I thought he was lying to me—I just plain didn’t understand.

  “I can’t help you,” he told me. “Some things you can’t explain. It was just what I had to do,” he said. “I lost somebody I loved a lot.”

  We’d come to this open space, and now I knew exactly where we were. Carlos loved to come here—it was where we used to play soccer.

  “Tony, Tony,” he said. He stopped walking and looked at me. “I lost you,” he said. “You were the one I lost.”

  Suddenly he was holding me—this bearhug so tight I was frightened. But it felt great for him to smother me like that. We just stood there, sort of rocking back and forth and holding onto each other in the dark. His hands were moving up and down my back, my butt, and I was pressing up against him like I used to do. If we could just hug each other hard enough, we could squeeze out everything that was between us there. There’d be nothing left except just us.

  I was getting a hard-on. I didn’t want it to happen—or I guess I did want it to happen, because there it was. And Carlos knew it too. He was always expert with his hands, leading me exactly where he wanted me to go, no matter where that was—and that was exactly what he was doing. He kissed the side of my face, and then his tongue was in my ear, and I just lost it—all this pent-up stuff inside me letting go. I arched my hips up against his, so he could feel me there, and then he was on his knees in front of me—he was unzipping my pants.

  I’d dreamed about this and jerked off about it so many times—it was the one thing I could always think of that would make me come whenever I’d jerk off. It was Carlos, who’d always had me exactly where he wanted. And I wanted to be exactly there.

  Then I remembered Ted, and it was this black door crashing closed on top of everything. “No,” I remember saying, and I took Carlos’s head in both my hands and tried to push him away. But it didn’t work. He’d managed to pull my dick out of my pants, and just when he touched his tongue to it I reeled back like some electric shock.

  I hated this man. I hated how he stepped into my life and ruined everything he touched and then just walked out without ever looking back. I hated every single thing that’d happened to me in my life since I met Carlos in the Nu-Way Laundromat.

  Carlos was still on his knees, crawling toward me even while I was stepping back from him. It was ridiculous. Behind us there was this fence—one of those snaking things, pickets wired together, that they unroll across the lawns in Central Park, I guess for some kind of crowd control. Anyway, I didn’t see it in the dark—I sort of stepped back on it. One of the pickets snapped under my foot, and then I went crashing down backward on top of it.

  Which hurt a lot, and suddenly that made me completely furious. “Fuck! Goddamn it!” I yelled out. Carlos on his knees there was laughing. Maybe he knew how pathetic all this was, or maybe he knew exactly what was going to happen next and he was laughing because he was so relieved, he was laughing because he was happy. He was walking right toward the bullets and he wasn’t afraid anymore. He was singing.

  I remember I pulled myself up to my feet just as he reached me and wrapped his arms around my calves. Then I guess I must’ve reached down and grabbed the fence picket where I’d broken it, and just wrenched the whole thing right out of the wire that attached it to the rest of the fence. I don’t really remember any of that, and I don’t see how I could’ve had the strength to pull that picket off the wire—but I guess I did, because there it was in my hand. Before I knew anything else I was slamming it into the side of Carlos’s head—holding it like a bat, and swinging, and the whole time he kept clinging to my legs like some nightmare that wouldn’t go away. I hit him probably ten times in the side of the head, each time connecting with this loud thwack!—and he’d groan, the way you groan when somebody pushes their dick in you and it both hurts and feels fantastic. Like death, some people would say.

  Then the picket splintered in two.

  Carlos seemed stunned. He wasn’t bleeding, as far as I could tell. He wasn’t doing anything—just holding onto my legs, and sort of swaying back and forth like he needed me to hold him up. I remember what I felt was this insane annoyance, like all I wanted was for this just to go away from me. I pushed at Carlos, but he w
ouldn’t budge, and I couldn’t untangle myself from him. The more I tried, the more furious I got—not with Carlos, but just the whole situation. I took the half of the splintered picket I was still holding and I poked at him with it. I guess I poked him pretty hard, because the sharp splintered-off end of it slid right into the side of his neck. I was horrified, and suddenly there was blood everywhere. Plus he started making this gurgling sound, and when I tried to pull the picket out, it was stuck. I kept feeling like this bleeding was something Carlos kept doing to annoy me, and it made me angrier and angrier. I gave the picket a tug, and this time it came out—and because he still wouldn’t let go of me I poked him again and again, as hard as I could, and I could feel it going into him each time I poked him. He’d let go of me by this point, and was in this weird position on his knees with his back bent way back, so his whole chest was exposed to me, and I guess what happened was, I hit his heart. Suddenly there was this explosion of blood all over both of us: Carlos gave this groan from deep in his throat and blood was spurting out his mouth, and that groan went deeper and deeper in his throat till it trailed away. After that he didn’t move anymore.

  Where he’d tried to blow me, my dick was still sticking out of my pants, and though I don’t remember this, and I wish more than anything in the world it wasn’t true, I must’ve come about the time I stabbed Carlos in the heart. Because the police investigator found my semen mixed in with the blood all over Carlos’s hair and his face.

  ONE OF MY FIRST MEMORIES—MAYBE THE VERY first—is this winter night when my dad woke me up and said to come outside. I must’ve been only two or three years old, because I remember my dad lifting me up out of bed in his arms, and carrying me out into the front yard. Me on one arm, and Ted, who was just a baby, on the other. We stood out there in the cold, on the patchy grass in front of the trailer, and my dad said, “Look up there, you’ll never see anything like this again.”