by Jim Nisbet
The entrance lobby was deserted. The two other doors that opened onto it, from a bar/restaurant and a janitor’s closet, were locked. The elevator doors remained open. Only the street door yielded to his touch. He passed through it. A brass mechanism closed it on his heels with efficient, silent dignity, and locked the rough trade into the night.
He stood in the entry of the cottage, unable to recall how he got there. He liked to think of it as his home, though he was rarely there anymore, and though it was less and less habitable, and, as it were, he watched himself watch himself, as he denied that some part of him was denying the import of the Sheriff’s notice permission to sink in.
Quentin had been gone for well over a month with no contact. Maybe it had been two months. Truth be told, China had made no attempt to contact him. The phone had been disconnected. Portentous notices had arrived concerning it and water, garbage, gas, electricity, their unopened envelopes neatly swept against the baseboard by the lower rail of the front door. The angle of repose possesses a certain inevitability. China ignored them in much the same way as he had ignored gas gauge, water temperature, oil light, registration renewal, insurance premiums, parking tickets, and unusual noises before the Datsun broke down completely. And then it turned out that Quentin had long since transferred the title to him, to China! Now he’d have to get a whole bunch of stuff square with the DMV before he could legally own another car. Either that, or manufacture a new identity. And so what? China had seen all these speedbumps before. He liked that term. Speedbumps at the other end of the straw of life.
All he did anyway when he was home was bathe and watch television. No doubt the water and electricity departments would have their say in that. Whatever. His hair wanted 100 strokes before he went to sleep. He flossed meticulously. There were manicures and pedicures to be self-administered, because he no longer had the wherewithal to purchase professional attention. There was a machine hooked up to the TV which enabled him to stay current with a couple of soaps and a so-called reality show he couldn’t bear to miss, about a gay hustler trying to cope with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, as well as the latest movies here and there on the schedule. But then, after several unopened notices, the cable service had been disconnected, too.
Had he told Quentin he’d been fired? That he’d spent what little money he had from his severance check on cocaine? Until, when he was down to tens and twenties, he blew them on speed on account of it’s better value for the dollar?
No matter. Unemployment had finally kicked in, he had thirteen months to go, and, because nobody could afford to pay rent in San Francisco while holding these kinds of jobs, inter-office gofer gigs were a dime a dozen. China smiled his best post-trick smile. Paying rent in San Francisco was not his problem. His brow furrowed. Or was it?
He used to spend a lot of time studying his face in the bathroom mirror, shaving carefully, mugging, tweezing eyebrows and nostrils, tracking a wrinkle or two, particularly the so-called crow’s feet that opened from the back corner of each eye like two miniature coral fans. After a while all of Quentin’s and even his own cosmetics and beauty products had been exhausted. The bathroom trash can was overflowing with empty tubes and vials and unguent bottles. But since the trash can and recycling bin at the foot of the sixty-nine steps were overflowing because the scavenger no longer picked them up, what use would it have been to take them out anyway? He had long since switched out the smaller bathroom trash can with the larger one under the kitchen sink.
Then he’d run out of toilet paper. Quentin had taken all the books. Which left the magazines. Which would eventually clog the waste line. Ask me if I care. Not enough traction either.
The laugh track of whatever sitcom crackled around the rooms, day or night, when China was around. Too loud, always too loud, it wasn’t the same as when Quentin was upstairs to be annoyed by it, but, in point of simple fact, China was too stoned to turn it down. No, that wasn’t it. The real reason was that China was too depressed to turn it down—that’s right—too depressed. The laugh tracks kept him company. If he ever got a cat he would call it Laugh Track. If it was stupid he’d call it Half Track. Ah haha. Now he was too depressed to turn one on, even if he could. He loved his routines, he needed his routines, and his routines were coming apart. And what difference did it make? There was nobody there for it to bother but him, and he could care less one way or the other. It was all the same to him. He could turn a laugh track on or off in his head anyway, anytime, just like that. Just as if he had some kind of mental remote up there, click and the sound was muted, or greatly diminished, and he could think for hours, undisturbed, with car commercials and talk shows and football games and braying celebrity pundits—it made no difference to him. His concentration was that great. So focused was his mind on—nothing. The Void. Embrace the totally carved city block. Visualize the empty parking space. Harmonize your tinnitus. Follow the ball that never bounces.
Wide awake, he spent fifteen minutes searching both floors of the house for an unidentified hum that ultimately eluded him.
He had already reread all of the glamour, movie, gossip, and celebrity magazines in the cottage, preparatory to stacking them on the floor next to the toilet, in anticipation of the final frontier. Except for the ones that had really interesting articles, which he would clip when he could concentrate long enough to find the scissors, and eventually went upstairs to raid Quentin’s bookshelves—only to find them completely empty. But wait: he already knew that. Just checking. In the time he’d been downstairs, looking for the hum, he’d forgotten the books were gone. Quentin’s clothes were gone, too, which China had once freely borrowed. Quentin’s newer clothes fit China rather well. In fact—he touched it without looking at it—this might once have been Quentin’s belt. No way, it’s too chic. But too bad, he thought idly, standing at the bathroom door, those magazines are all pretty much alike. Some of the articles, though, especially the deeply researched ones about any royal family, Princess Grace, for one outstanding example—the rest of those poor Grimaldis, for another—are really good. My god, the life they live or lived. The glamour, the tragedy. … And not a faggot among them, by all accounts. Satellite faggots, though. Oh yes, your quality people have your satellite faggots. …
Suddenly and copiously, his nose began to bleed. He’d thought it was snot, but blood is thinner than snot. As a rule, China thought, as he watched the water—he blinked: hadn’t they turned off the water? Evidently not. But it was cold. That’s right. They turned off the gas but not the water—as it diluted the red to pink.
That bitch Quentin was always on my ass to improve my mind, always recommending this or that book to read, and now that I have the time to read he’s cleaned out all the books. What a hypocrite. He probably sold them to support a drug habit I didn’t even know about, some shit he took to keep him from pissing his pants. These old queens will have their secrets. He abruptly experienced a pellucid recollection of the man in the lederhosen. Laughing at something, wielding that truncheon. What was his name. … Can’t remember. Got away. Probably remember it at three o’clock … this afternoon. China suddenly felt confused, or stupid, even. And cold. What’s that about? And what’s so funny? What … Aloud China test-drove a laugh, and he was startled, about halfway through to suddenly hear it. So he stopped laughing. Always too loud, China’s laugh was never appropriate or appreciated or contagious and, always, betrayed a hysteria perilously close to the surface of his shoal personality, no less dreadful than the screech of tires behind you in a crosswalk, this laugh was perhaps his biggest social weakness—if you didn’t count his intelligence and level of education and drug habits and vanity and so forth. China’s jaw tightened. Occasionally he let slip a risible shriek in a bar where they didn’t know him too well. It happened in that one on 18th Street, Bareback Mountain, it’s called, where many faggots gather to watch Monday Night Football. Capital letters, that’s right. Bit of a clubby group, if you’re asking China. Quite the shrill fan base however, if you
’re asking people in marketing. Quasi-religious, really, like elevating the host only televisual and loud, all the way though football season which, these days, runs from July to February. Or … Isn’t it through March, now? Some people say I’m stupid, but I say some people don’t have a life. A lot of older men cruise the scene for jocks—I got real estate, you got a big dick, let’s get together and transactionally analyze that. In fact there’s usually a lot more old Nellies in there than jocks, so it’s easy pickings for somebody of China’s build and looks. … Used to be, anyway. Why doesn’t this bleeding stop. … Did I take aspirin recently? But one Monday night China was in there and he’d snorted a little gak and downed a couple brandies and got himself caught up in the game unawares. There was a mark sitting one stool over, obviously a little uncomfortable and surreptitiously eyeing the talent around the place—such talent as there was to be discerned amongst the other customers who were mostly carbon copies of the mark—and carbon copies is a most appropriate image, given their average age, digital copies being an appropriately modernized figure of speech to describe the five or six hustlers up and down the bar more or less interchangeable with China himself. He’d long since discerned that the mark’s excitement favored the team wearing the red and blue uniforms, and as he thought this thought about the carbon and, skipping xerox, digi- techno- generation on-beyond-zed gap, a red and blue jersey intercepted a pass meant for a chartreuse and gold jersey and—well, out it slipped, that shrill bray that sounded like a car accident, and the mark, who heretofore had looked just about prime to pick up the tab on the next drink China had already ordered over his shoulder, blanched, shook his head, excused himself to the toilet (two toilets back there, both labeled MEN), never came back, and China had to pay for his own drink. Ten minutes later he noticed his mark working another corner of the room, speaking and gesticulating animatedly. China hadn’t even turned around to check out the source of the general hilarity that erupted into the momentary silence that had engulfed him. He knew it was aimed at him, and his cheeks burned. …
So he comes home to an eviction notice. Pesky pesky memory node, somehow cycled around it again. Something else to ignore, for sure, but China was no longer loaded enough to ignore this additional little fact of life as it got under his skin and ran riot. Otherwise he’d suppress the real impetus of whatever feelings generated, his highly-evolved excuse machine would kick in and hatch various scenarios, like him standing before a judge saying “Not tonight, honey, I have a headache ’cause I ran out of Percocets,” or, “Because the deputy here impounded my stash” and so forth. Lame lame lame. Which would then piss him off of course, but, properly set up, the next moment he’d totally forget what pissed him off in the first place. It’s good policy to be pissed off, but every now and again somebody will ask you why you’re pissed off. You can tell them it’s none of their business, but what if they’re into real estate? But there’s little real estate sufficient to compensate for this vague sense of foreboding hovering in some disused part of the back of his head, which was most of the back of his head, and therefore capacious, and certainly adequate to contain entire caravans of phantom forebodings, free-floating neuroses, polyvalent anxieties, with plenty of uninhibited blackness left over, and all of it with a bottomless appetite for drugs, as insatiable as a developing country’s appetite for petroleum.
As for the front of his head, the bleeding had stopped. Christ, that took long enough. He rinsed his hands and turned off the ever-cold water. It’s a wonder I have any blood left at all. Wasn’t there something I was supposed to be doing? Scissors? Asswipe? Princess Diana? Sourceless hum? He looked up. Gone. He blinked. Job, maybe? Oh yes, the job, maybe. And come to think of it, there was that job to be showing up for, at nine o’clock. Although he had the place so wired he could get there at ten and by eleven and he’d have everything done that needed to be done by lunchtime. … The problem was to get there by lunchtime. But wait, wait—he’d been fired! A not-so-tiny frisson of panic darted from the back of his head all the way to the front. All fucked up and no place to go—again! Can I somehow blame this on 9/11? Maybe that’s what the hum is about. A little reminder. Something along the lines of, get all of those damned rubber dinosaurs out of your locker in the mail center and hand over your security badge. He frowned at the kitchen window. Something about the portrait reflected there caused him to dismiss what he was trying to remember as unimportant in the greater scheme of things. He could understand that he could see the lights of the city as if through the image of his face: but, still, did this image have to look so ghastly? Is it the hair? He cautiously turned his head to one side.
But he didn’t want to tough it out. Not just now. Not this minute. So he didn’t.
His friend Nikki the tranny who styled wigs for oh, you wouldn’t believe the socialites and celebrities and entertainers who send Nikki their wigs—Nikki never got going until ten or eleven. Of course Nikki runs her own business and always has time to watch daytime television, just beyond the wig. A girl has to keep up with this stuff. Exactly. Daytime television is all about wigs. How true. It’s hard to believe it’s about anything else. Darling, wigs rule. …
So maybe after a few drinks China would snort two reeealely long lines and, say, maybe, say, maybe trash Quentin’s house. That’s it. Pure rage. He only takes this stuff out on the inanimate, on other people’s stuff you understand. Never on his own stuff, and never other people per se. Well, okay, there’s verbal abuse—come on, you old queen, get it up! I’m waiting! Flex it! But the sun’s coming up! Your surgery looks terrible no matter what time of day it is. How do you feature that? But not physical abuse. Never. China is gentle like that. And there’s a way of looking at his relationship with Quentin—and they did have a relationship, make no mistake about that; Quentin was the only person China had met in a long time willing to take him seriously—as a person, China said to the face in the window, which seemed to be watching him. You could consider that China deliberately torpedoed Quentin’s every intention as a sure-fire way to hurt, not Quentin, but China himself. Self-defeating. Counterproductive. Passive aggressive, one might say, toward oneself. A sad case. Appalling really. It’s because I never had the money to see a shrink. No, darling, wait a minute. There you go again. It’s because you never took your own money and spent it on a shrink. Did not Quentin himself, not two years ago, back when he was still a high-flying real estate broker, put you on an allowance with the proposition that you spend a hundred of it a week or whatever it cost for an hour with a good shrink of your own choosing, an elective selection he left up to you, one he trusted you to make by way of encouraging you to take on a little responsibility for yourself?
Well, yes, it was back when he was a high-flying real estate broker, but it was also back when he thought I was worth the trouble.
I know where I can get two, two and a half grams for a hundred bucks, China said to the window, without moving his lips. I need a barstool in here, he thought, so I can sit and watch the mirror I mean window and lean over and snort dope and pour myself a drink without standing up all the time. He tried to remember the last time he’d been home. Probably Thursday night. He’d made it into work Friday morning, got fired, and now it was Monday of next month. Or was it the following Friday. Still no leads on a new pad, somebody who needs a roommate, a fuck buddy, a concubine, a tweezer of nose-hair. Hey, sure, put a roof over my head, of course I’ll tweeze your nose hair. Happily. No problem. Try me. Nikki acted like she hadn’t even heard the question. He knew better than to try to get a job delivering dope. Or thought he did. Tricky without a car. Anyway, the only dope delivery system he really understood was a soda straw, or the bottom half of a ball point pen, or a snapped-off car antenna, or a rolled up hundred dollar bill, although it had been a queen’s true age since he’d held on to one of those latter delivery systems long enough to use it for delivery. A single is more like it. A hundred dollar bill, he thought wistfully. … Do queens really live to be so old as that? Wait a mi
nute.
Wait a minute. What the fuck am I thinking? He dipped two fingers into the watch pocket of the designer jeans he’d scored in a thrift shop on Market Street and—voilà! A C-note! And a bit o’ bindle right behind it! God is great! The client had tipped him before showing him the door! How could he have forgotten this? Well, hell, they always tipped, for one thing. If it’s one thing China-boy knows how to do, it’s get tipped. Never fails. There’s a special place on every circumcision! But not that often is it a hundred dollar bill. He smiled with toothsome satisfaction as he rolled the bill perpendicular to its length into a tight little tube of uncounterfeited parchment. What a life. If somebody managed to figure out a way to make casual sex between consenting adults disappear, little faggots like me and that Nob Hill client would re-invent it before you could say three-day weekend. China hoovered two immense lines, unrolled the bill and licked it clean. Centilingus, Quentin had disdainfully called it. China had made him spell it out for him. People laughed when he repeated it. Later Quentin came up with centillatio, then shortened it to C-llatio. China made him write it down. People laughed when he repeated it. You should write for television, he told Quentin. So that I, Quentin had archly asked, might find fulfillment in life? Over-the-hill bitch. He’d heard somewhere that sixty percent of the hundred dollar bills in circulation in the United States bear detectable traces of cocaine. The fucking feds probably can’t tell the difference between cocaine and methamphetamine. Or maybe that accounts for the other forty percent, and they’re being coy with the statistic. You can sure tell the difference when you snort it, though. Maybe the feds will give him a job. Federal Shit Detector. Makes one think that, if the feds somehow figured out a way to make cocaine disappear overnight, people like China Jones would reinvent it faster than you can say In God We Trust. Sister, China thought, as his laryngealpharynx vibrated like a reed in a bass saxophone, that would be something. A real accomplishment. A contributor to the history of mankind like Lindbergh, say, or Pasteur, or George W. Bush. A succulent raisin in the unleavened bread of life. A plot device, in—face it—the unexamined plotlessness of my own post-modern narrative. A clothesline strung between tenements, teeming with plot devices hung out to dry. Blow Reduxer, it could say on my tombstone. Or just plain Blowmo erectus. Ass to ash. Centilinguist. Incised on a marble cenotaph, tomb of the missing hundred dollar bill, white as pure veterinary blow, carved to resemble so many bricks of cocaine stacked in a federal evidence locker. Talk about your fulfillment late in life!