Robin tottered into another room.
Light.
“Wow.” The kid gasped, hid his eyes. “Man, that’s intense.” He could see a camera. The motel-looking bed. Ken way off to the left, naked, fat. “But . . . I don’t know,” he added.
“All right, three hundred dollars.”
“Creep,” Robin whispered.
Slayer, lyrics and all, barreled right through the walls, luckily for Robin.
Gripping that thin wrist again, Ken whipped the gyrating kid at the “bed.” Robin stumbled there, fell on it.
Ken stood looking down at the crooked, white butt. Sweet, he thought. Its perfection made Robin-nobody a magnet. How?
“I’m gonna fuck you,” said Ken.
“But,” Robin slurred. And his butt tensed. He was thinking of AIDS, which he didn’t know that much about.
“Then we’ll rest.”
Shutting his eyes, Robin silently asked Tom Araya of Slayer to help him relax.
Slayer: Restrained insane games suffer the children condemned . . .
The kid’s butthole gulped down Ken’s cock, wiping both of them out.
“Stop!”
The kid was worried how stupid his screaming would look in the video.
“This looks great,” Ken said, fucking. He peered at the camera.
Tick, tick, tick . . .
The kid’s dull, red butt getting slopped with some runny come. Splat, splat . . . splat.
Then the man sucked the kid’s miniature cock till it shot a white drop at the roof of his mouth.
Ken stuck out his tongue, showing the camera his prize.
Tick, tick, tick . . .
After Robin came, he looked insanely at Ken.
When the telephone rings, Ziggy swipes it. The receiver’s all . . . greasy. “Hello,” he says, basically normal again, though he does have to swallow some wobbly snot right away.
“What’s up?” asks Calhoun’s deep, vibrant voice.
“Wow, Calhoun! You’re awake. It’s . . . late, right?”
“I guess.” Calhoun chuckles.
“I’m just working on my magazine. What’s going on with you?” Ziggy plops down on the sagging corner of his bed.
“Well, um . . . did my shot. Thinking a little. Not much. Oh, I watched that videotape.”
“Yeah?” Ziggy waits, but there’s just the warm, indefinable silence that radiates out of Calhoun between every sentence. It’s always a drag not to be right there talking in person, but, Calhoun being Calhoun, meaning private, especially of late, Ziggy can’t quite respond how he’d wish, and say something like ‘I really miss you.’ So . . . “And?” he asks.
“I don’t know,” Calhoun answers, and laughs. “Why exactly did you want me to see it?”
“For your take,” says Ziggy. “’Cos I’m trying to figure out what I should think about it, and you’re the person I most love and trust and all that. So . . . yeah, just your opinion.” He immediately realizes he shouldn’t have said the word love, and sort of snuggles the receiver into his ear, cheek, listening for subtle stuff.
“Hm. Well, you were into it, right? At the time?”
“Yeah, yeah. It’s complicated. I was lonely, blah, blah, blah, you know? And my uncle’s interesting in a way. You met him.”
“Yup,” says Calhoun. “Didn’t much like the guy.” He laughs. “Tries too hard. Or he did with me.”
“That’s ’cos he’s, like, attracted to you.”
“Yeah, well . . .” Calhoun breathes out, annoyed probably. “Whatever you want to do. But I thought the video was disgusting.”
“Okay,” Ziggy says, reassured. “I mean, I knew it was disgusting, but now I’m . . . sure. Thanks.” There’s a brief stretch of silence between them, which feels harsh to Ziggy, but, seeing as how Calhoun’s much less talkative since he got into heroin, maybe it’s just a kind of newfangled, natural space in the friendship. “So, uh . . . was it weird watching the video while on, like, heroin?”
“I don’t know the difference anymore,” says Calhoun. “You really should try shooting up sometime.”
“Yeah.” That seems to induce another uninterpre-table silence.
“No, forget I said that.” Calhoun chuckles. “What do you want me to say? The video bugged me. And I’m not gay, so I can’t really form an opinion. I . . . I wish bullshit like that didn’t happen, I guess.”
“Me too,” Ziggy says. “Definitely.” He snorts kind of weakly. “Anyway, fuck it, uh . . . When do I get to hang out with you next?”
“Mm . . . I guess tomorrow’s okay, if you want. But call before you come, in case I’m writing.”
“Cool. Hey, yeah, how’s your novel?”
“Oh . . . it’s stalled, but . . . I’ve got some . . . mm, ideas.”
“Well. . .” Shit. Ziggy clenches his jaw to keep from wondering aloud if Calhoun wouldn’t write more without heroin. “I’ll . . . call you, like, in the late morning?” he squeaks.
“Fine.” Calhoun clears his throat. “See ya.”
“Yeah, uh—”
Click.
Calhoun’s mouth’s hanging open. His thoughts, emotions, etc., are so indistinct it’s like . . . what? . . . that they’ve splintered to . . . atoms somewhere in his overtaxed brain or . . . whatever. Every idea’s uncooperative, mush. That’s the point. Affection does this to him. And Ziggy’s so beyond affectionate it’s bewildering. Calhoun’s only long-term reference point when it comes to emotion is Wendy, his mother, who tells him she loves him all the time, eyes haywire with alcoholic exuberance, though nothing much else that transpires between them is as simple as that supposedly ultimate sentiment. She’s a total neurotic, which may make her love a lot spookier than Ziggy’s, and, well, more understandable. Because of his screwed-up upbringing, Calhoun thinks human love is an outmoded concept. It does not compute, as they say, though he’s learned to use “love” in his fiction when needed. That’s different. If love’s ever an issue outside art, like now via Ziggy, or sometimes with Josie, part of him gravitates to that supposed love very conventionally, and part of him’s sort of appalled but can’t exactly control the first part, except in terms of the way he responds, words-wise. He has theories galore about how well the world seems to function when one maintains distance from all other people. At some point in the past he’d been weak—a confused adolescent, obedient to parents and lazily Christian. Later, having read a little Nietzsche in school, he decided, among other things, that the world was preprogrammed by Satan or God or whoever, and, semibelieving this theory, as he continues to do on occasion, human beings are viruses. Thus, nothing matters. Self-absorption’s the rule, if one follows that logic. But, at the same time, being stuck in the stupid real world, he can’t help but realize he’s an asshole for not just announcing, ‘I love you too, Ziggy.’ Because that’s the truth, he supposes. Certainly he’s grateful. Plus there’s a great chance his gratitude constitutes love in itself. Didn’t he read that somewhere? Calhoun looks at the phone, even reaches his hand out to call Ziggy back, but, seconds later, the logic behind that idea just . . . dissipates? And he zones out, mouth open, eyes glassy, hands splayed in his lap. Looks bad, but it feels unbelievable. Tick, tick, tick . . .
Dark blue air, starless, accompanied by crickets, bird chirps, and the occasional revving of cars whose ghostly headlights have somehow infiltrated the overgrown bushes and trees that parenthesize Ziggy’s dad’s house, throwing flashes, streaks, smears, general washes across a, oh . . . five-foot-square chunk of the backyard fence. Pretty. Ziggy hugs his knees, watches the lights, eyes essentially dry now. His hand’s okay. His stupid feet aren’t that thrashed after all. They could be bad pottery. They’re practically scabbing already. The New Day Rising cassette’s on its umpteenth play. He’s trying to fantasize why he’s upset into a single frame comic, but his emotions are too, uh, nearby now, too . . . focused? I Apologize No. 20 is already heavy on drawings where giant stick figures rape tiny stick figures. And that’s all, blink, bl
ink. Ziggy can, blink, blink, blink, picture right now . . . “Oh, fuck.” His eyes fix on the phone. Fucking ring, he thinks. Tick, tick, tick . . . Okay, then explode, he rethinks, and adopts a, like, telekinetic or whatever stare. Tick, tick . . . “Come on.” Tick . . . He grabs the thing, groaning a little. “Shit.” Poke, poke, poke, poke . . .
Click.
“H-hello,” Nicole mumbles. She’s under that cloud again.
“Hi, I’m really sorry,” Ziggy whispers into the mouthpiece. “It’s me. I just had this idea that I’d come see you . . . now?”
“N-n-now? Okay, but . . .” She yawns. “. . . why?”
“’Cos . . . I’m sort of . . . freaking out.” Ziggy’s lips silently form the word please about seventeen times in quick succession.
“Well, okay. I live at 7322 Vena Mondt Road. Do you know where that is? Near the corner of Kroening?”
Ziggy props the receiver between his shoulder and jaw, stands, pulling on the nearest clothes he can reach. “Yeah, I know where that is. But, uh . . . I have to . . . hitchhike, so . . . I may take . . . a while, but I’m leaving . . . this second.” He squats down, feels around for socks, shoes.
“Ziggy, I . . . I’m trusting you. Shit. Look, when you get here, go through the gate—”
“Yeah, yeah. Wait, should I bring pot or whatever?” His mind does a search of the kitchen. “Or . . . beer?”
“No! Look, just . . . get here as soon as you can.” There’s a click as she hangs up.
“Yeah, great, bye.” He drops the receiver into its niche, zips up his jeans jacket. Then he crouches amid the ugly, multihued rubble of ex-furniture, ex-books, ex-posters, etc., for a second, loading his pockets with things he might need. Little black phone book, house key, Certs, lighter, Swiss Army knife, condoms, folded-up copy of I Apologize No. 19 . . .
Robin faked sleep, even drooling a little.
Ken made a phone call. Stroking the kid’s butt, he hyped it to one of his customers.
Blah, blah, blah . . .
They were still in the “motel.”
Robin secretly soaked in Ken’s fucked-up affection.
“Hey,” Ken said after a while, shook Robin.
“Yeah?” The kid yawned.
“Talk to this guy.” Ken held the receiver above Robin’s ear, mouth.
In the phone, someone breathed.
“Hello?” Robin asked.
“You made a video with Ken,” said a voice with an out-of-town accent. “Tell me about yourself.”
Robin yawned.
“I understand you’re of Scandinavian descent. Are you blond?”
“My grandparents are British.”
“Ken claims you’re gorgeous.”
“Yeah, he likes me.” Robin grinned. He looked up at Ken, who was grinning too. But when their eyes met, all happiness faded out.
Ken took back the phone. “It’ll be ready next weekend,” he said, listened. “Okay, any requests? We’re halfway through.” And he listened again. “Easy. Pleasure.”
The kid rolled over onto his back.
“Little dick, though,” Ken said. “To be perfectly honest.” A few seconds later he hung up.
Robin looked at Ken’s fatness. “I don’t know why, but you don’t gross me out. No offense.”
“You getting tired?” Ken asked.
“Yeah.” Robin yawned. “But I can’t fall asleep.”
“These’ll work.” Ken slid open a drawer in the bedside table prop, seized a pill bottle. “Take three,” he said, screwing the lid off.
Robin washed all three down with his lukewarm beer.
“Let’s get a few hours’ shut-eye,” the man announced. “Then we’ll finish up.”
Robin rolled over onto his stomach. “Can you turn off those lights?”
“Yeah.” Ken was studying the butt yet again. It looked totally different, more . . . squarish, more adult. “Don’t you have parents who’ll care where you are?”
“I’m out a lot,” Robin slurred, a little drugs in his voice. “Seeing Slayer and shit.”
Robin’s butt was magnetic again. So Ken reached over, spread its skimpy crack with his thumbs. He forced about an inch of one fingertip into the asshole.
“This feels weird,” Robin mumbled.
Ken twisted the finger. “You’re gorgeous,” he said, sort of out of control for a second. Inside, the kid’s butt was profound for some reason. Why? The temperature maybe?
Robin opened his eyes, as if he wanted to say something back, but instead he just lay there and blinked at Ken’s mottled, white, jiggling thigh.
Ken probed.
So it must have been eight in the morning, New York time. I was sprawled across the bed, studying some gray air outside, for my apartment faced a narrow air well. Too horny to sleep, I did my best to think peace-fulesque thoughts. Still, no matter how rural they grew, Ziggy, nude, formed the centerpiece of every image.
Eventually I gave in and shuffled the possible hardcore scenarios re: my young son, most of which were rewrites of his stories of Brice’s “abuse,” as Ziggy termed their odd sexual relationship. These true-to-life stories had always enticed me—I would literally ache post-recounting—yet, heretofore, they’d seemed crude, or too crudely relayed, to be inspirational.
I “saw” Ziggy punched, kicked, pummeled down to the floor, clothing ripped away—Brice was infused with unusual strength to, well, fuel this scenario—and there, there was my darling’s firm, dusky white ass. (A guess.) Brice, a red-headed sketch with a very large penis, fucked Ziggy—fierce, violent strokes—that was his style in the old days at least—throwing punches, etc. When things became dangerously roughhouse, I broke down the door, shotgunned Brice, rescued Ziggy, and nursed his innumerable wounds. But nursing gradually devolved into the world’s most elaborate rim job.
The deeper I rimmed, the more fluid my target became—simultaneously the spanking, if speculative image of Ziggy’s asscheeks, and that of a second, more immediately available rump. It “belonged” to Osamu, a seventeen-and-a-half-year-old modern dance student who lived two floors below in my building. I’d been preparing this boy—without his knowledge, of course, though he was obviously nursing an innocent crush on me, that much was sure—for a roll in the sack ever since we met shopping for organic pears in the health food store just up our street.
So, half the time I “went to town” on my fantasy object, it was Osamu, not Ziggy, I ravaged, with no discernible shift—even slight, up or down—in enthusiasm, focus, or degree of emotional involvement, an equanimity I found rather curious, even amidst my temporary, desire-induced noncriticality.
The light was bright enough outside to call it a day. In the next several minutes, I devised a little scheme whereby my fall guy—for that’s how Osamu appeared in light of my son’s availability—would be allowed to compete unknowingly in an equitable contest with Ziggy. Then, refining the “hows” of this featherweight bout—more on that later—I masturbated halfheartedly until further notice.
Calhoun sits back, still relatively high, thank God, eating blueberry yoghurt. The taste tickles its almost bland way through the stinkier aftertaste of a half-pack of cigarettes. On his laptop computer screen: one paragraph of his novel-in-progress. The last sentence dangles before a pulsating cursor. It’s an intricate beginning of a description of Gwen, a character based on his long-distance girlfriend. Like the novel itself, this description has reached a kind of comatose state for the moment. She, the novel, lie in an impenetrable stillness just outside his grasp. Oh, sometimes he’ll go back and change a word, punctuation. But he’s too pleasantly settled to do more than fiddle around with his accomplishments sort of admiringly. It’s almost perfection how heroin nails other people and places generally at the distance he’d like them to halt. If only the drug wasn’t so fucking expensive. There’s the rub. To be happy, to hustle his parents for money to pay off his dealers, he has to concede a portion of his brain to the conventional world. Because, despite his philosophy, Calho
un’s too sentimental and nervous to rip off the populus, much as he hates human beings in theory. And this politesse leaves him virtually jailed in his desk chair. Oh, sometimes he lies around on the bed that rests four feet away. On rarer occasions he wanders through his sweaty, windowless loft. With its half-finished dry walls and crooked corridors, it suggests a cheap carnival fun house. Surely he painted it that way on purpose, he can’t quite remember. As a child, one had scared him so much the police had to come in and escort him out. No doubt it would seem cheesy as hell now. Sad, he supposes. Still, everything’s equal, which is to say irrelevant, from the spectacular, fogged vantage point of wherever he is at the moment.
“Thanks for the lift, sir.” Slam. Ziggy runs up Nicole’s parents’ driveway, knees slightly bowed, arms straight out, fingers splayed like a tightrope walker’s, pockets rattling they’re so packed with bullshit. The front yard’s a small national park complete with hills, lake . . . “Jesus.” The mansion’s facade is an exact replica of the White House, at least in the dark. Behind a small fleet of parked luxury cars is a chain-link fence overgrown with clumpy dying or dead vines. As soon as he’s unlatched that gate Nicole mentioned, and slipped through, a little square window with opaque, mottled glass, like in shower doors, illuminates way, way, way up near the roof. The fuzzy silhouette of a hand moves across it. Ziggy relatches the gate, then stands around in a kind of courtyard looking idly at three tilted bicycles. Ten-speeds. Italian, he guesses. Eventually a door he can barely make out to the left opens, revealing a wisp of Nicole. “Ziggy, here,” ushers her ashen voice. He squeezes inside the house. Odor of . . . corn bread? She’s dressed in a bathrobe that looks like some grandma’s fur coat, at first glance anyway. Her dishwater blond hair’s loose, tangled, hanging over her painfully smart eyes. Wishing he’d showered, he trails her even-better-than-he’d-pictured ass through a dark hall, up steep, darker-yet stairs, sneaking occasional sniffs of his armpits. P.U., he thinks, fanning the immediate air. Right turn, down another hall lined with rotten paintings of . . . whatever, villas, and they’re inside . . . well, Nicole’s room presumably. It’s so brightly lit, he has to cup his eyes. “Stay here,” she whispers, reentering the hall. As soon as her footsteps have faded away, he spits twice in one palm, shoves it under the band of his underwear, and cleans his grubby cock, studying the room’s furnishings, which are too . . . organized or whatever. His eye catches a sparkling mirror hung over her, uh, antique dresser. He moves close, squints at his reflection until it’s in focus, then revolves like a beauty pageant contestant, evaluating his details, one eye on the doorway. Cute, yeah, okay, he decides. At least in clothes. Nicole’s stuck a few Polaroids here and there in the mirror’s frame with . . . Bart Simpson refrigerator magnets? Ugh. Some smiling, remotely familiar jock hugs her in most of the pictures.
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