Try

by Dennis Cooper

  The man hobbles a few feet and throws his suitcase down on the dining-room table, then bends over, clicks open the lid. “First your presents,” he says, reaching into the jumble of T-shirts, CD’s, socks, uh, what the fuck’s that? His hands reemerge fists, which he immediately hides in the small of his back. “Pick one.”

  Ziggy nods toward the left for no particular reason.

  Roger’s left fist swings around, stops, hovering at chest level, cracks, and this white cloth droops out, looking for all the world like a really huge gob of spit. “I’d like you to slip into this . . .” His remaining fist jabs into view, blooming finger by finger. A small, Pepsi-colored pill bottle is perched on the palm. “. . . then take several of these.”

  “What are they?” Ziggy plucks the bottle, holding it up between him and the ceiling light.

  “In my day, we called them goofballs. I think you kids use the term pharmaceutical straitjackets.” Roger lays the spitty cloth, which is actually some sort of, like, silken bikini, over Ziggy’s raised arm. “Now, off to the showers.” He scrunches his eyes, zigzagging them down Ziggy’s chest.

  “Okay, cool,” Ziggy says. “Ha ha ha.”

  Roger grins. “It’s . . . spectacular to see you.” He obviously means “see” Ziggy’s crotch, though there’s nothing of note in that particular region, thanks to the T-shirt, unless his dad’s studying his thighs, which are totally available, not that Ziggy can imagine them turning guys on, except—oh, yeah, right—in the early days, particularly re: Uncle Ken. Still, they were different back then—short and skinnier, to start with—and, so, probably just, like, cutesy in the way children are to adults right across the board.

  “So . . .” Ziggy raises an eyebrow.

  “So.” Roger glances up. For some reason eye contact sets off this intense, like, commotion, and, by the time Ziggy’s brain’s back in order, his face is tipped sideways and swirled painfully on his dad’s. Their tongues are saliva-wrestling in his mouth. Shit.

  Ziggy screws free. “So. . . I need to get stoned first, ’cos . . .” He backs away, still shrugging. “. . . uh . . . ’cos I always do that when I . . . sleep with guys.”

  Roger reaches behind himself, feels around in the air until his fingertips scrape the upper edge of the couch. He sits, whispers, “Whoa,” maybe very ironically, and fans his glistening head. “I haven’t been this overwhelmed,” he adds, “. . . since I scored with that blond boy in Ride. Not the short, chunky drummer. The ethereal one. You know, who writes their material?” He’s studying the air or something over Ziggy’s right shoulder, overly intent, a doctor. “Do you like their music?”

  “Yeah, sort of.” Ziggy turns, checks his path. Ten, eleven more steps to the door. “Calhoun’s into them.”

  “Did I ever tell you that delicious little story?”

  “I don’t think so, uh . . .” Backwards step, backwards step . . .

  Roger’s eyes focus, relocate, pin Ziggy’s. “Hold on a second. You’ll be very amused by this.” His slacks have, like, sprouted this miniature, uh, mountain with a suspiciously hard-on-shaped ridge. “Well, I’d just interviewed the band, and . . .” He starts fingering the ridge. Shit. “Darling, please. Can’t you wait just one moment?”

  Ziggy halts.

  When Calhoun sleeps, you’d assume he’s in some kind of pain, at first glance anyway. Face stricken, mouth open, air rustling in and out, thanks to some lingering asthma. Heroin’s just fogged the boy in, made him alternately spacy or tense, and, hence, a rockier emotional commitment, as psychiatrists might say. But Calhoun’s ambivalence is part of his charm, by his own drugged-out figuring. Not that he’s swimming in friends. Still, Ziggy, especially, acts so absurdly honored or whatever to know him, for no particular reason that Calhoun can glean. The guy’s obviously a weird form of addict. Let’s leave it at that. Because Ziggy’s real motivations are too complicated to solve when you’re zoned this consistently. The most sincere person on earth can seem so . . . conspiratorial, his friendliness such a smoke screen for . . . something. Insanity? One of heroin’s gifts to its users is how it makes abstract and sort of diffuses anything that’s not an in-relative-focus, quick arm’s length away. At the same time, unfortunately or fortunately, the more alluring the thing, the scarier it reads. And love’s about as ungraspable a thing as is humanly possible, to Calhoun’s way of thinking. Here’s his definition. Love: a hybrid emotion made up of various other emotions collaged by some weak individual’s mind to try to quell a particular horror that’s not been wiped out by more standardized symbols like Christ, etc. Nietzsche, right? Whatever. Drugged brains are so easily, pleasantly exhausted. Whatever. Luckily or unluckily, Ziggy’s love’s sort of impossible to quash. Why? Maybe his frenzy’s conducive to Calhoun’s dead air, in the same way that people with ultradichotomous astrological signs are supposed to meld thanks to some hard-to-grasp system of planetary alignment. Point is, Ziggy’s there. And love, however fucked up, is just the beginning of what Calhoun needs these days, even he has to admit. So it’s a match. Now, if only . . . If only he’d quit shooting heroin, if only something amazing enough came along to replace it, if only he’d give up peacefulness long enough to search further, if only he’d try a little harder at least. Please, kid.

  When the fat man woke up someone chilly and stiff had come to rest on his arm.

  Ken flipped his sweaty head, left ear to right.

  Robin’s face, twisted by bad dreams or something but gorgeous for six, seven seconds, then, blink, blink, a forgettable nothingy object dissolving in Fatso’s shock.

  “Jesus . . . fucking—” Ken jolted up, yelling.

  Ripping open the curtains, a fat man spun 180 degrees, picked his bed out from its surroundings, and, sprawled on top, the most significant-by-default creature he’d ever . . .

  A boy like a big piece of chalk.

  Ken trudged slowly into the other room.

  Tick, tick, tick . . .

  He sprinted back.

  Fatso sitting by Robin, head cocked, dripping sweat in long, rough strands, like the rays of a horrible sun.

  A boy like a board.

  The fat man looked half-forlornly at a pale yellow phone on his night table, not thinking anything at first.

  Then he wailed toward it.

  Behind Ken’s immense, sopping back, a Heavy Metal kid cross-faded into . . .

  Rrring, rrring, click.

  “Frankel,” Fatso yelled into the almost-kid-corpse-colored receiver. “You said once . . .” Huge breath in. “. . . didn’t you . . .” Huge breath out. “. . . that you’d be interested . . .” Etc. “. . . that you’d pay a lot of money to . . .”

  In the telephone’s earpiece: “Shi-i-i-it.”

  Far behind Ken, Robin creaked like a wooden house.

  “You could . . .” The fat man gasped. “Do that thing . . . if you hurry.”

  Robin: Creak.

  Earpiece: “Give me a couple of hours.”

  Click.

  Cre-ea-ak.

  Don’t worry too much about you-know-what.

  Ken stared out his nightmarish bedroom. In the distance—his kitchen, its table—an outdoorsy light caught something made out of metal or glass, glittering suspiciously.

  Ziggy locks himself inside the John, fills a water glass, chases down four or five of the pills Roger brought him. He strips, checks the mirror, not bad, ha ha ha, throws the rubbery curtain aside, and starts a hot, violent shower. “Mm . . .” Revolving under the spray, Ziggy puts himself through the usual scrubbing-down shtick, then, hm, why not, shoves a shampoo-flocked finger way, way up his ass, making sure it’s hygienic enough for Mr. Ass Connoisseur or whoever. Spooky. Whoa, he thinks, scrounging around. There’s a . . . compartment up there . . . a, like, pocket at the top of the tube that he can’t, ouch, travel deep enough into to figure out physically. Remember, he thinks, withdrawing, smelling the finger. “Ugh.” Explore that place later. “Don’t forget.” Then he cracks up for no particular reason. “I’m fucki
ng sto-o-o-oned,” he says. He slides purposefully down a tile wall, mock dying, hands crumpled, into the bathtub, which feels like it should be less hard than it is. It’s almost impossible to stand, but he gets to his feet with the help of the cowboys-and-Indians-themed shower curtain. He even manages to turn off the spray, stumble onto the mat, defog the mirror temporarily with the wipe of a forearm. “No . . . way.” There’s a moronic grin stuck to his drippy face. Whoosh, whoosh . . . He can’t even towel it off. That’s hilarious. Everything’s hilarious, until, that is, it’s time to put on the pair of costly jockey shorts Roger insisted on giving him. Then he realizes how sloppy he is, and, though he doesn’t give a shit at the moment, sloppiness is a state he normally avoids at all costs. “Shi-i-i-it.” He has to lie down on the floor and yank like a factory worker or something to get the shorts on, they’re so tight and difficult to keep hold of for some reason. Clambering to his feet, he squints into the mirror. Oh duh, he thinks, seeing the perfect outline of his cock and balls. Every little testicle crevice and cock ridge is visible, as if they were bare, but kind of squished and consistently white. “No way.” He laughs, flopping back on the toilet seat. “Dad!”

  “Yes, dear.” Roger’s haughty if muffled voice answers so clear it’s clear he’s been listening outside the door. Yikes.

  “I have to, uh . . .,” Ziggy says, slurs actually. “Uh, before we do it, I have to . . . call Cricket, this friend of mine. ’Cos . . . I promised.”

  No reply.

  Ziggy grabs onto a towel rack, pulls himself to his feet, weaves through the misty, narrow room, banging against sink, wall, towel rack, etc., unlocks and throws back the door. Roger’s sitting cross-legged midhall, naked. “Oh . . . shit.” Ziggy shields his eyes. “God, Dad.”

  It wasn’t as if I hadn’t seen Ziggy’s bare chest before, but, sitting there, peering up at that incomparable precipice, I couldn’t help but be startled anew by its compact, V-ish configuration—which I could easily call definitive for someone his age—complemented, as planned, by those tight, elegant briefs, through which his splayed genitalia made such a bizarre first impression, like a bagged octopus.

  He stood wincing at me, his expression part-dulled by my peacemaking drugs. Yet, as exquisitely hewn as Ziggy was, there remained the distinct if not quite catastrophic downfalls that come with being a teenager, such as how the body’s internal organs go temporarily insane—confused by their newfound roominess perhaps—turning formerly nondescript areas, such as the armpits, into gracefully designed exhaust pipes with which others in the world must learn to cope. And Ziggy’s pits, with their fine explosions of almost black hair, were, even then, something of a problem, reeking as fiercely as two cornered skunks. Nevertheless, I was determined to read this “problem” in a positive way. For that stink, so generically B.O.-like to the casual sniff, came from him.

  “Dad, I have to call Cricket.” Saying that, Ziggy lurched down the hall, presenting me, thereby, a glorious if staticky view of the ultimate objet. It couldn’t have been more ideal, at once plump and boy-flat, tenuous as a cloud, with a short, discreet crack—a particular favorite of mine, I might add, since it suggests functionality, period, and, in so doing, indicates the brand of structural perfection one only finds in the minimal.

  I leaned back on the wall, entranced, dizzy, as, far away in his bedroom, Ziggy’s mildly out-of-control voice started blathering. Eventually I came to my senses, and killed time exploring the house. (More on that later.)

  I had reached Brice’s room when Ziggy veered through the doorway. He staggered to a central spot, turned his back, gripped his underwear’s waistband, and, almost too hastily, propelled the fabric wad to his feet tops. “Freeze,” I yelled. Heavens. His was an ass so pale and simple it seemed to be made out of plastic—a blindingly innocent entity, its only discernible flaw the line of frittery hairs in the otherwise invisible crack.

  I sat on Brice’s futon, rapt, processing that modest little packet of clues for a long time, while Ziggy rocked about, stoned and unsteady. “Now stand up and face me,” I said. He did. And there, there were his genitals. Decently sized, they leaked, reddish and drab, from a messy brown bush. While the penis is not my particular fetish, this being his, I felt fond of it, even remotely intrigued, etc., as to its agenda.

  “Everything okay with your friend?” I managed, hoping a dumb conversation would reroute his steam.

  Ziggy nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “I sort of set up a three-way for us in two hours. At Cricket’s place. That’s cool, right? Cricket’s a transvestite, but that’s no big deal, right?”

  “Whatever you like,” I replied, smiling warmly. (In truth, his idea only semiintrigued me. I know I should feel a certain kinship with drag queens. Sorry. Still, no doubt this “three-way” would be an opportune time to make a study of him.) “I’m going to retire a few feet,” I added, sliding back toward the head board. “You lie face down here.” And I patted my former location.

  He took his position professionally.

  “Talk to me,” I said, stroking a babyish asscheek. It immediately tensed into a white boulder.

  “What,” Ziggy answered.

  “How would you characterize this?” I asked, poking the object in various locations. “Say, if you were under oath on a witness stand, and your ass was vital evidence in some murder case.”

  “What do you mean?” Ziggy said, exasperated perhaps, though I heard slight amusement in his tone as well. Remember, I couldn’t see his face. “You’re so weird.”

  “Never mind then,” I answered. “It’s old enough to speak for itself.” (Awe had unraveled my wit, which is typical.) I inserted two trembling thumbs in the asscrack and parted it gently, anticipating a noseful of faint, spicy steam. But a strong smell of cloistered shit filled the immediate area, throwing my awe into limbo. For while the nature of an ass more than interests me, my son’s interior foulness asked of its scholars an almost inhuman diligence. Still, desire being what it is, I managed to wedge my face into the garrulous crack.

  “Dad?” Ziggy’s voice queried. It was now approximately five minutes into my worshiping.

  “Yes?” I asked back, still faintly nauseous from the stench which my slobbering had only spread farther and more complexly into the room.

  “Could you get the Hüsker Dü cassette from the deck in my room and, like, play it in here while we’re doing this?” Ziggy gazed over his shoulder at me. Such an extraordinary face, at once pert as a model’s and continuously flappable around sputtering blasts of . . . insecurity, I suppose. “Please?”

  In sleep, Calhoun’s day reconvenes into an action-packed, disjunctive, misrepresentative trailer of sorts. His sweet, wheezing, pillow-bound face is a theater closed to the public. Ziggy’s crashed over here a few times, too depressed and/or stoned to hitch home, watching Calhoun’s slack, moonlit expressions change, albeit subtly, along private lines. It’s painful for Ziggy to not be right in there with him. But sometimes it’s painful, theoretically at least, to be in there as well. Like now, when, to nobody’s knowledge—not even Calhoun’s, since he never remembers his dreams—a blurry image of Ziggy is beating, the shit out of him, letting fly with fists, feet, yells, etc., for no stated reason, though Calhoun’s dream logic tells him this particular punishment’s more than deserved. The fight itself doesn’t hurt, but the message is spooky. It makes Calhoun’s sleeping face twitch. If he could remember this later, tell Ziggy, perhaps, just perhaps, in a distorted way, he’d be as close to conveying his love as is possible under the terms of his . . . emotional damage? Too bad. He won’t recall a detail. It’s terrible that friends can’t intuit these things from one another, though guessing games keep them together as much as their blab. That’s Calhoun’s idea, or his big hope at least. He’s so lost in this bed. In a perfect world Ziggy would sit beside him, wide awake, shivering with unprocessed tenderness. Calhoun would jolt from the dream, spot his friend, realize everything’s cool. They’d lie around bad-mouthing everyone else until .
. . whenever, dawn. But Ziggy’s so far away and oblivious. The heroin in Calhoun’s blood keeps him asleep through it all. Meanwhile, the world’s disinterested. When his nightmare ends, Calhoun’s face smooths imperceptibly.

  While Roger’s gone, Ziggy shakes out his ass doggie style, but saliva keeps trickling out of his crack, down his inner thighs. Footsteps. Click, click . . . click— A frenetic, in-progress guitar solo carves his thoughts into a stupidish mishmash.

  “Loud enough?” Roger yells.

  . . . Death’s an art, flesh and earth never part . . .

  “Yeah, it’s fine, fine,” Ziggy yells back. Shit. “Just . . . fuck . . . it’ll do!”

  . . . Spellbound and gagged, I commend your flesh to dirt . . .

  Slayer’s Heavy Metal onslaught makes Ziggy’s nakedness feel sort of, uh, melodramatic, like if the bedroom was packed with white-trash teen Neanderthals bellowing for him to be fake-sacrificed, which would be a hilarious idea, except the music’s reminiscent of Robin, whose greenish body’s still vomiting, etc., right smack-dab in the thick of this sound track too, symbolically at least.

  “You have the most symmetrical buttocks I’ve seen in my life!” Roger yells. “And I’ve seen quite a number!”

  “Thanks!” Ziggy yells back, but he’s only heard . . . red or whatever. It’s almost like Slayer mixed Roger’s monologue in there purposely to illustrate the Satanicesque bullshit they’re shrieking about.

  . . . Purged of your dead body, sacrificed of your life . . .

  “Ouch.” Ziggy’s asscheeks are clutched, wrenched apart. “Careful.”

  . . . smell the stench of immortality . . .

  There’s a whinnying noise from Roger’s mouth and/or throat that’s so, like, conducive to the Slayer that Ziggy feels ambushed.

  . . . Take my hand and let go of your life . . .

  “Dad!” Ziggy peers over his shoulder, past some unfocused, poppable pimples, to Roger’s face, which is sort of poured into his crack, gray and characterless as cement. Crushed underneath, his asshole’s being chewed up and buzzed with cold air every couple of seconds.