I finger through the papers. Feel a tap on my shoulder. “Happy Friday, Theo.”
Jim is my temp. He’s twenty-two years old. He just graduated from DePaul and we’re contracting him from Sally Girl. He may or may not stick around. “Jim,” I say. “I think today we should organize F.”
For years I’ve been seeing a professional dominatrix. Her dungeon studio is on the second floor of an industrial building, near the Lake Street train. Next door is an Irish bar where first-time customers are expected to call in from the downstairs payphone. I remember the first day I came to see her, during the Gulf War. She wrapped me in Saran Wrap so I couldn’t even move my fingers. She slapped me lightly, then pulled a mask over my head. The mask had a long tube coming off of it so I couldn’t see, and she whispered that there was nothing I could do. Then she pinched the tube and I couldn’t breathe. It felt like I was relaxing for the first time in my life. I usually go on Fridays but recently it hasn’t been working for me. Recently it hasn’t even been close.
I sit naked in an airy waiting room with my hands folded into my lap, my clothes in front of me in a wicker hamper. There’s a large desk with a rotary-dial phone on it, a bowl full of mints. On the wall a single black and white photo of a dark-skinned woman, a whip curled around her body like a snake. A blond lady comes in carrying a riding crop. She’s new. She’s tall, six feet at least, with enormous breasts and wide hips. “Let’s go,” she says, snapping her finger in front of my nose.
I follow her, carrying the wicker hamper through two rooms full of medical equipment, rubber masks with plastic eyes and long snouts, masks shaped like dog’s heads, enema bags, baby cribs, cages, and into a third room which is populated with a padded wooden table, two large thrones with throw rugs in front of them, a leather hammock with metal chains at the end of it, walls full of whips and strap-on dildos. “On the table,” the blond lady says. “Now.” I climb onto the table, face down. She yanks straps around my ankles. “Lower,” she says. “Wider.” She pulls on my legs, then my wrists. She pulls me around like a doll. Then her hand comes down heavily on my back. “Maybe I’ll have to come back and watch you,” she says. “Are you an exhibitionist?” I nod my head while sucking in on my lips. “I might like that.” And then she leaves.
The table is cold, especially against my genitals. I wait for the familiar clap of Mistress Jade’s heels tapping the floor. She usually leaves me like this for ten minutes before coming in. The hospital is a long way. I’ll go there from here. Today was a bad day at work. Everything is bad recently. They used to get Petey in the bathroom with towels full of soap bars, over his head and in his stomach, drumming him with their heavy bags. He’d end up lying on the tile floor, his face full of blood, trying to smile, the blood running in rivulets through his teeth. I’d wash myself in the corner slot and stare at him lying there. He was this deformed white animal.
I hear the knocking and the long slide of a metal latch, the door opening as Mistress Jade walks in. Then I see her, standing in front of me, latex shorts, thick brown legs. I stare straight ahead, to the top of her thighs, her voice above me. “What have we got here? Look at him. Oh, he looks so funny.” I hear the other girl, the blond one, laughing. Mistress Jade walks away from my field of vision. “What is this?” Mistress Jade’s hand searches between my legs, grabbing, holding, and then squeezing, my body arching up to give her a better grip, the familiar, painful squeeze shooting into my stomach. “Look, he’s getting hard. He’s a pervert. You want to use this? I don’t think so. Hmm, hmm, hmm.”
The other girl’s hands are pressing firmly on the sides of my face, her fingers pinching my ears. She’s wearing a strap-on dildo. She rubs it under my nose. Mistress Jade is wrapping a cord around my penis. I open my lips and the dark silicone head of the dildo pushes toward the back of my throat, making me gag. Mistress Jade pulls the cords tight and I let out a muffled scream. “Come on now, sissy. Sissy, sissy boy.”
Petey is alone in a pasta-colored hospital room just south of Bryn Mawr Avenue, the bed next to him empty. In the homes, we were never alone, squeezed into rooms on mattress quotas. When we got out we all swam away. He’s watching the little TV up on the stand above him and shuts it off when I come in. He has dark yellow circles under his eyes, bandages across the middle of his face. Both legs in casts. When he smiles I see the missing teeth, but he was missing teeth already.
“Theo,” he says, with that absurd, uncomprehending voice he has. We’ll do everything together. “You came to see me.”
I shake my head, put the flowers on the stand next to him, and sit on the window ledge with my hands folded in my lap. The view below is flat roofs and smokestacks. A nurse walks by the room pulling a four-wheeled dolly full of plates and urine samples.
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“Doctor says I’ll be out in a couple of weeks. Check this out. I press this button and it injects morphine. Want to try? I’ll dose you up. It’s craaaazy, man.”
“They gave you morphine.” I smile and I consider it, but I don’t do it. We met in Western when I was twelve and Petey fifteen. I shouldn’t have been there. The walls were soundproofed and the doors locked from the outside. Petey had been stealing cars and driving them around Park Ridge and Elmhurst. He took them from the city and drove them out to the suburbs where there are houses with green lawns and trees in front. He watched the mothers send their children off to private schools.
When they brought him to my room I raised my hands and folded my arms over my head. “Don’t come near me,” I told him. He was the ugliest kid I had ever seen. I had my own problems. “I haven’t shot dope in years,” I say, plucking the needle from his arm, wiping the blood on my pants. I make a fist and squeeze my forearm. With my other hand I push the pin into my wrist and Petey presses the button. It feels nice, like a hand over your face.
“That’s all you can get for ten minutes. Better take the needle out.” I pull the needle out and smile at Petey. The IV hangs between us. He presses the button and morphine squirts on the floor. “I guess you could have gotten more,” Petey says. “Hee hee.”
I shake my head. “Big Petey.” The words come out of my mouth slowly, my lips are stuck. “You never win any fights,” I say, rubbing my chin and my cheeks, trying to stretch my face. “I bet you spend more time getting beat up than you do sleeping. You always got beat up.”
“Not like you,” he says. “You had protection.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I say, still shaking my head, leaning into the window, comforted by the glass and the rising smoke from below. We’ve never talked about Mr. Gracie before. Mr. Gracie, bringing me back into the room every Tuesday night. Afterward, the long walk back through the corridors of the ward. The electric buzz of the hallways. The rooms locked from the outside and the boys sleeping. Mr. Gracie walking behind me but still hovering on my back, then unlocking my door and closing the door behind me. The rumble of the lock. Petey lying awake, waiting for me. His eyes like mirrors. The high wears off quick as it came. I clear my throat and try to be the voice of reason. “My wife, you know.”
“You didn’t invite me to your wedding,” he says, like it’s our own private joke.
“I didn’t invite anybody to my wedding. It wasn’t much, just her family, some friends of hers from school. Wet chicken.” Petey leans forward, as if he was going to sit up on his elbows, then winces and slowly leans back into the pillows.
“Tell me about your wife.”
“We were married in Houston. Mosquitoes the size of elbows and smog like soup. You can’t even see the sky. It’s the worst place I’ve ever been. I never thought a city could be that ugly.”
“Was it bugly?” he asks. “Butt ugly?”
“It was fugly,” I tell him. “Fucking ugly. Don’t be an idiot. Stop following Maria. That guy she’s with, he’s an animal. It’s not safe.”
“What’s your wife’s name?”
I put my hand up. “No one expects the Spanish Inquisition,�
� I say. Petey smiles, then winces again. It occurs to me that it’s my fault. “Zahava,” I say. “You’d like her. Everybody does. She’s easy to like. She smiles a lot. She likes to have a good time. She used to do a lot of cocaine but she doesn’t anymore. That was a long time ago.” I shake my head. “Really, Petey, leave Maria alone.”
Petey makes a movement that resembles a shrug of the shoulders. “I love her,” he says, as if it were the most simple thing in the world and the smell of the hospital had nothing to do with it, as if anybody who walks away from love is a fool, and I know as soon as he gets out of here he’ll be standing outside her window again, hoping for a breeze carrying some of Maria’s scent. Maria smells like cheap lotion from a Jergens bottle, peaches, which is what her skin feels like where there aren’t scars. And Joe will kill Petey, because that’s the kind of guy Joe is.
I came home one day to an empty efficiency and I knew Maria was gone for good. She’d been going out more and more, leaving the apartment in a short skirt with no underwear, the wind biting at her blue-veined legs. Heading down to the gas station, getting in cars. She’d come home with bruises, black eyes, a bloody nose.
“Don’t go out, Maria.”
“What do you know? Stop me.” What she was really saying was, Make it stop.
I made my own trips, to the Wasteland, but everything’s different. I was nineteen years old and knew less than I do now. I’d squeeze into Maria’s clothes when she was gone, take the stairs in stockings, walk the streets in her underwear, mascara around my eyes. The girls in front of the bookstore ignored me. The gangsters near Howard just laughed. “Hey bitch, you want to suck my dick?” I’d run from them. Sometimes I’d stop. Sometimes they’d catch me. I didn’t know what I wanted and Maria wouldn’t stay home. I cried when she showed up with hash marks cut across her chest. They were over her breasts and belly, thin diagonal slices. Red, with bits of blood on the edges. Her body looked like it had been hog-tied in razor wire.
“Who did this?”
“I wanted it.”
We’d look at each other sometimes, both of us beat up, neither of us able to protect the other one. We’d stare at each other with as much space as the small mattress would allow. Two years ago she called me at work. She was back in the neighborhood. She wanted me to meet her new boyfriend. She wanted to know what I thought.
We sat in the back room of a bar on a cobbled street by Loyola University, the kind of place where old men order beer by the pitcher. Maria looked fit and healthy for the first time in her life. She wore skintight leggings and a shirt that stopped at her waist. She kept her eyes low. The guy she was with had muscles coming out of his neck and shoulders like a car grille. She went to hug me and he grabbed her by the hair. She lightly patted my shoulder with one hand instead. I decided to ignore it. We had two beers and spoke in generalities about things like the cement border the alderman erected in the middle of Howard Street. When I asked Maria where she had been she said, “Around.” Joe yanked her chair over to his and she looked at her hands. He spoke for her.
“She was in Wisconsin, working in the Oshkosh factory in Apple. OK. We live behind the Heartland.” He glared at me. He said he worked out six days a week and flexed his arms to show me that he meant it. He said he knew how to kick-box. “Theo, or whatever your name is,” he said. “Maria had a hard childhood. Everybody has a hard childhood. I had a hard childhood. I used to get beat up a lot, believe it or not.” He talked like he had been sucking gas with pebbles in his mouth. “You know what I did to the people that used to beat me up when I was a kid? I found them later and I put them in the hospital. Every last one of them.”
I sipped my beer and stared up at the bar TV. I wondered why Maria wanted me to meet him. Did she want me to save her? Or did he put her up to it? On the TV the Bulls were playing the Pistons. It was the playoffs.
The next day Maria called. I had to take the call at my boss’s desk. I didn’t have my own desk. “He hits me. You wouldn’t do that.”
“I hit you sometimes.”
“Not the way I like it.”
“I didn’t want to leave bruises.”
“I like bruises. I don’t want to make any more decisions.”
I pulled at the pens near the filing cabinets. I took a pen and pulled the cap off, then put the cap back on. Where I was sitting I could see a sliver of lake from the window not too far away. My boss kept a metal pencil sharpener on her desk shaped like the Eiffel Tower. “I don’t like it,” I said. “He’s a monster. I bet he can’t even add.”
“You’re jealous,” she said, and I could hear that same anger in her voice. “You want the same thing so don’t judge me. You wish someone would tell you what to do. If you could find a girl to make your decisions you would let her. We’re the same.” She was waiting for me to deny it. To tell her what she had with Joe was garbage. That she was just another abused housewife.
“I still don’t like it,” I told her. “It’s a stupid way to think.”
“It’s not thinking at all,” she said. “That’s the point.” That was the last time we spoke and Maria was the only girl I ever loved.
***
“That’s two nights staying out late,” Zahava says. “You’re a wild man these days.” She’s putting dishes up in the cabinet. The papers that were all out on the table last night have been put away and replaced by a thin leather bag. As she reaches up, her shirt rises and I see her thin pale stomach, the small muscles on her back squeezed together by the belt of her jeans. She’s getting better looking as she’s getting older. She wasn’t very pretty when we first met in a restaurant near the university four years ago. I was cashiering and she was waiting tables. She had another boyfriend then. I was working two jobs, night and day. Zahava was about to start law school. We sat at the bar at night, having drinks. Then we’d go out, the whole restaurant, all the waiters and the bartender and dishwashers. We’d go to clubs down on Belmont where we’d dance or sit at the bar with our chin in our fists. There were a lot of habits in that restaurant. One person died, others left town or went to rehab. Others got straight and got married. We don’t go out together anymore. We see each other at home. I take off my backpack and lay it by the door.
“I stopped to see Petey in the hospital. He looks terrible.” I pass to where we keep a Jack Daniels bottle on the second shelf. I have the urge to wrap my arms about her waist and kiss the back of her neck but I grab the bottle instead, pour a splash into a glass and top it with an ice cube. I move into the living room. Turn the TV on. There’s an ad for Home Alone 2. There was no concern in Zahava’s voice. I could have stayed out for a month and it wouldn’t have mattered. She’s been cheating on me for a while now. A guy she works with, Mickey. An athletic-looking guy, tall, with thick black hair, strong features, high cheekbones. I get up, change the channel. This couch has gotten soft and old. How did this happen? She thinks I don’t know but she leaves her checkbooks open. They do it at a pay-by-the-hour hotel just west of downtown.
***
Not counting Petey, Marco is my last friend from the homes. Though we’re not really friends. He once led a group of kids who pissed on my clothes when I was out of the room. We drink together sometimes. We have several beers and we talk about Petey. One time, during a riot, Petey, Marco, and I stood back to back to create a “triangle.” It worked. When it was all over and the place was locked down, we were unscathed. Now Marco is heavyset. He works in the fish department at a high-end grocery in Lincoln Park.
“Joe holds the door at Pine Lodge,” Marco says. “If you’re curious.”
“That’s right on the border,” I say. “No man’s land.”
“Only four a.m. for miles,” Marco says. “And to the north of there it’s dry.”
I grab a napkin and scribble out a map. Eight lines, crosshatches, a taxi stand, then nothing. There are two pool tables now in the back of Carrie’s. Several groups of men hang back there, some with their own sticks, flames shooting up the wood. I shake
my head, so bewildered by the things people do.
“Why don’t you go see Petey?” I say. “He hasn’t had any visitors.”
Marco waves his hand. “Payday mayday,” he says when the bartender comes over. “Did you visit me when I was in prison? How about a shot.” The bartender lays one shot of dark orange liquid in front of Marco and he raises his eyebrow and I nod and he puts a shot in front of me. Marco flicks his fingers and the shot disappears. He shakes his head. “Oogly oogly oogly, aaah,” he says. “Of course he hasn’t had any fucking visitors. He’s a loser.”
“There’s an obligation.”
“The statute of limitations has long since run out on any obligations I might have.”
***
On the very edge of Chicago, before a taxi stand, and then a gulch, and then the flickering lights of St. Francis followed by the wealthy North Shore, there’s a twenty-four-hour Walgreens. Next to the Walgreens is a Jewel grocery store with a big, juicy orange sign. Next to that a shoe repair, a Ben Franklin General Store, and at the end of all of that a Bakers Square, and then the Pine Lodge.
Late at night there are maybe twenty cars in the parking lot, all of them driving home drunk come four in the morning.
I walk through the parking lot and feel the weight of the city pressing into my shoulders. Joe sits on a stool, his large frame dwarfing the chair legs, in jeans and a leather shirt, waiting as people come up to the bar, identification in hand. I wonder where all of these people come from, like ants crawling from a Howard Street sand hill, to go to this bar so late at night. I think of the news footage last night of the houses on the Malibu cliffs and the waves bucking against the hills and the mudslides and the houses falling into the ocean.
I hand Joe my ID and he looks at it and he recognizes me. “Didn’t think I’d see you again,” he says. His voice is higher than when we first met, and the muscles in his forehead seem to be forcing themselves over his eyes. “You sure do wait awhile. Maria said you’re a coward and you would never have the guts to come around.”
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