. . . At one with the evil that has ruled before . . .
“This is the wrong cassette!” Ziggy shouts. “Do you mind getting the other one?! It’s inside the deck! It says Hüsker Dü on it!”
Roger surfaces, jowls vibrating, eyes lowered and seemingly wet in respect for . . . Ziggy’s symmetry? He looks mentally retarded, but calm, like he’s watching some sentimental old film on TV. He unhands Ziggy’s ass. It splats shut.
“And please turn this tape off!”
Roger’s staggering across the rug.
. . . Spill your blood and let it run onto—
Click.
Ziggy si-i-i-its up, way woozy. Roger’s so pale, hard to see, and unmuscled, if memory serves, that he’s almost a snowman, which would be kind of cool if the thing didn’t have an erection.
“Wait,” Ziggy slurs.
The snowman stops in the doorway, revolves, frowns at its addressee, one blurred hand pumping away in its crotch.
“We have to, like, stop for a while.” Ziggy blinks his eyes clearer. “’Cos this is freaking me out.” He tries to seem serious, which just means engraving some misery mixed with a little hate into his features without actually getting upset. “For a second, okay?”
Roger, who’s maybe three-quarters human again, nods. That’s better. His fist stops midjerk, loosens, tumbling away from the danger zone. Cool. “Painful associations with Brice?” he says, shutting his eyes.
“Yeah, partly.” Ziggy nods in case Roger is peeking. “But also ’cos I’m a total shithead, Dad. I know I am, and . . .” He reaches back, scooping a palmful of bubbly spit from his asscrack. Ugh. “. . . and after sex, people, especially guys, seem to figure that out, whereas, uh, before we have sex there’s a thing that . . . makes up for my bad side or something?”
“I’m listening.” Roger folds his white arms.
“Let’s stop for a few minutes.” Ziggy bounces around, making the futon exhale fartily through its buttons. “And, uh . . . we can start up again, like, with Cricket. Then later on, uh . . . it’ll be us by ourselves, and you can do what you want to me. I promise.”
Roger sighs, period, so he’s definitely pissed. Still, his cock’s sluggier every second, and that speaks volumes, at least the kind of volumes Ziggy’s interested in.
“Give me a minute to chill,” Ziggy says. “So I’ll feel more . . . trusting.” He’s bouncing again. Pfoot, pfoot, pfoot . . . “Like, by myself.”
Roger’s lips open a fraction. His pointy tongue tip tours them for a couple of seconds. “Mm,” he says thoughtfully.
Lying next to the Metal corpse, Ken jacked off, constantly adjusting his squint until the thing looked . . . if not quite alive, then appealing.
He’d rolled Robin onto his stomach. Better.
In the fat man’s peripheral vision, an unfocused head, back, butt, legs, etc.
It’s Ziggy’s friend Calhoun, Ken thought. I gave him some very strong heroin. He shot up. He’s in dreamland. I get total use of his body. That was the deal. Camera’s over there somewhere.
“Shit.” Fatso felt around on the floor for his T-shirt, and spread it out over the corpse’s un-Calhoun-like head.
Not a peep.
Okay, Ken thought, settling again. Calhoun’s in dreamland. Face unbelievably limp. Probably on his way out. I gave him a fatal dose. Why not? Poor junkie. It’s . . . really . . . tragic.
The fat man jacked onwards. With his left hand, he rubbed Robin’s stony butt.
So far so perfect.
Calhoun’s butt, Ken thought. All clogged up from the dope. Not worth a cent to him. A total hassle, if anything. Never even looked at the fucker for more than a second.
Robin, still totally dead, whether Ken believed it or not.
Maybe the corpse “saw” white light, tunnels, all that.
I’ve straddled him, Ken thought. Lick his neck, shoulders, back, crack the butt, eat my brains out. Keep glancing up at Calhoun’s emptying face to stay emotionally involved.
The fat man raised up on one elbow.
Ken’s aerial view of the butt with some Metal kid fuzz at the edges. “Oh, ye-ea-ea-ah.”
Robin, the human fridge, full of chilled organs, bones, etc.
I’m fucking Calhoun, Ken thought. Great “bad trip” look in his eyes. Totally tight, clingy asshole. Reach underneath him and fondle his loose dick and balls. Jam my tongue through his jiggling lips.
The fat man really, really jacking off, getting so damn close.
Metal corpse, same as it ever was, maybe sturdier.
Calhoun’s dead, Ken thought. Happened just a few seconds ago. Check out those eyes. Tell him I hated him so much. That does it. Rear way, way, way back.
The fat man spewed on his belly, shivering, exhaling, and yelling like Hurricane Whoever.
Robin, Ken’s ex, going bad about a foot and a half to the left.
Ziggy shuts his bedroom door reasonably tightly considering how Brice’s kicks fucked up the lock. He leaps onto his bed, squeak, squeak, listening for Roger’s footsteps, but the hall sounds untrammeled. Unfocusing his eyes, he imagines the house is a brothel of sorts, and he’s been given a choice of prostitutes between people who look like Nicole and Calhoun. Or . . . better, yeah, he’s inside a weird, ultimate brothel that asks which human beings you’d most like to be with, and kidnaps them for you or something. His two beloveds would stand at attention across the room, nude, hands on genitalia, awaiting his verdict. It takes a minute or so to successfully devise likenesses then give them characteristic expressions—perplexed in Calhoun’s case, and, uh, well . . . just beautiful in hers. Okay, cool. Weigh the fuckers, ha ha ha. For instance, is her reciprocal lust hotter than Calhoun’s complete lack of interest? Whose face would be sexier grinding open-mouthed against his? Which naked body—Calhoun’s is a sort of deduction since Ziggy’s only seen chunks of the guy (chest, back, arms, legs)—would he go more insane near? Etc. Vague pluses and minuses are piling up in vague mental columns. The ideal duo’s posing there, freeze frames. “Can I choose both?” Ziggy sees himself asking some brothel employee he doesn’t even bother to envision. Sure, break the rules, dude. What a saint. Thanks. Now Nicole and Calhoun turn in circles like dazed, avant-garde ballerinas or something. Both bods are conventionally great in this relaxing, forgettable way. Hers is just, well, uh . . . he wants to get in there immediately. It’s hard to deep-six that idea long enough to give a thought to Calhoun, but, once Ziggy foregrounds the guy, backpedals her, there’s this different, incredible effect. Like he tears up in seconds. His lips start this “I love you” mantra that makes stupid tears overflow. Shit. Calhoun, moved, shuffles across the room, sits on the bed next to Ziggy. After some nervous throat clearing, they grab and, uh, hug one another, both sobbing like . . . whatever, children? Ziggy strokes Calhoun’s hair, and vice versa. Tick, tick, tick . . . After a while, Ziggy forces himself to look up from his best friend’s invaluable skin, etc., and yeah, Nicole’s still right there, waiting. He eye-motions her over. She squeezes between them. Calhoun shoots him a look of such gratitude, love, excitement, etc., that Ziggy has to dig his fingernails into his thighs to keep from bawling again. At her suggestion, they wedge themselves—boy, girl, boy—lengthwise on the twin bed. Calhoun and he rub, kiss, lick her for minutes. Details don’t matter for some reason. It’s ideal, definitely, ’cos he can do what he wants with Nicole, whom he’s bonkers about, temporarily at least, and, every once in a while, share some sweet eyeball time with his equally turned-on best friend, whom Nicole’s also into. The combination has this peacefulness about it, around which the world of Roger can, like, completely fuck off, explode for all Ziggy cares. And it’s during one of these ultrareassuring tête-à-têtes with Calhoun, their cocks snuggling up in her cunt, that, back in the real, horrible world, Ziggy shoots a wad of sperm on his stomach and ribs, gasping so vociferously that it’s a miracle Roger’s not tiptoeing down the hall, hoping to, like, exploit the situation, but . . . Ziggy listens closely through his
bliss, rush, etc. No, the . . . coast’s . . . clear.
I spent . . . oh, a half hour touring the living room, hoping to exercise my dormant critical faculties. I think I can say, for the sake of this argument at least, that my ex-boyfriend’s taste in furnishings, while primitive, indicated an admirable, obsessive aesthetic of sorts. On a minuscule budget, he’d managed to raise a specific, fine-tuned little world around Ziggy and him—a kind of cut-rate theme-park-in-a-tract-house, referencing the Old West, or should I say the “Old West” as romanticized and muted by Hollywood.
From the Clint Eastwood–esque bent of his videocassettes to the choice of wallpaper, across which a dozen or so violent period scenes—shoot-outs, bronco busting, wagon train attacks, etc.—were faux-carved repeatedly at, say, foot intervals, into a milky brown “bark,” the place positively rang with gentrified masculinity. Everywhere I strolled, unkempt boys and unshaven men frolicked in one-dimensional splendor, be they shut up in yellowed, mass-market paperback books, reduced and frozen in tasteless porcelain figurines, or made heroically fluorescent via the worst paintings one could imagine.
There was a very brief phase in rock music’s development, around the early eighties if memory serves, when punk rock’s growing pains found a few rather lesser practitioners infusing their fierce, three-chord tunes with a slight countryish swagger, as if this historical referent would somehow legitimize their highly unpopular music. Cowpunk, as this subgenre came to be known, was a rickety concoction at best, but it reads interestingly in retrospect, if, that is, one approaches rock music as a kind of psychological graph of its particular artists. I subscribe to this reading, of course. And it seemed a logical leap to apply this same critical stance to the “art” of Brice McCauley, interior designer.
In Westerns, Brice undoubtedly believed he’d unearthed an official, historical grounding of sorts for his lack of morality. Were he back in Laredo, Dodge City, or any one of those mythical hamlets, there’d have been, to his thinking, a general consensus about the necessity of cruelty. Presumably wife beating, child abuse, rape—these contemporary no-nos were just part and parcel of preindustrialized life. Brutalized children blossomed happily into renowned brutalizers, unself-consciously getting their rocks off, oblivious to the now ingrained, rather Big Brother–ish lessons of psychoanalysis. Safe in his dim re-creation of a lawless utopia, Brice could lord his foul moods over Ziggy, et al., and come away both with a stuntmanlike rush and the self-respect of a dedicated Revisionist. Fascinating.
The fat man exhaled into the telephone’s mouthpiece, creating a tinny whirlwind in his listening ear.
“Hello,” said a sleepy voice.
“Calhoun?” Ken closed his eyes, wobbly dick squashed to shit in one fist, skinny blond baby-faced junkie kid snagged in his head.
“Yeah, who’s this?”
“Ziggy’s uncle.” In Ken’s head, Calhoun sat on his lap, shooting up, jeans unzipped, too high to give a shit. “I met you once when—”
“What do you want?”
“Some mutual back scratching.” Ken slid down low in the couch, jacking off. Calhoun’s deep, edgy voice helped the situation immensely.
“I was asleep.”
Hard to keep the old voice steady. “Ziggy says . . . you have a heroin problem . . . I know what that can do . . . to one’s finances . . . Maybe I could help you out with some . . . money, say . . . three hundred dollars . . . in return for . . . a sexual favor.”
“I’m not gay.”
“I know.” In Ken’s head, Calhoun slumped forward, nodding, face eerily gone. “What I’m proposing’s . . . a simple trade-off . . . You’re paid, I get . . . quality time with your body.” Ken was mentally helping Calhoun to the Sex Hole. “You don’t have to . . . touch me. You . . . don’t have to look at me . . . Get as high as you . . . want. Pretend I’m not . . . there.”
“Jesus.”
Calhoun’s scarecrowlike body facedown on a sharply lit bed. “Let’s say four hundred dollars.”
“Nope.”
“I can score you some . . . really good heroin.” Pump, pump, pump . . . “A friend of mine . . . sells the purest dope . . . in the city.” In secret, Ken slapped, ate, slugged, fucked Calhoun’s flat, clogged-up butt.
“Hm. Is it in rock form or powder?”
“Whichever you like.” Under Ken’s eyelids, Calhoun was gradually O.D.’ing where nobody knew who could give a shit.
Calhoun didn’t talk for a moment. “You know, you’re disgusting.”
In Ken’s mind, Calhoun’s big mouth started rattling. Pump, pump, pump . . . “So keep your eyes shut.” He felt incredibly close.
“Fuck off.” The phone clicked.
Ken exploded in Calhoun’s corpse. “Oh, ye-ea-ea-ah,” he said, dripping two strings of sperm on his gigantic stomach.
In the fat man’s ear, a tinny whirlwind.
Ziggy’s organized his bed into a shambly office. Short stack of fresh paper, several petrified copies of Spin magazine to keep the paper from buckling, pencil, artist’s eraser, a warped pile of recent I Apologize drawings and interviews. He’s even uprighted the Polaroid of Calhoun and him, sort of for the same basic reason that business types fill up their offices with shots of loyal family members. Cool. Ziggy, gulp, lifts the black telephone onto his “desk,” quickly dialing a number so magic, to his mind, it could be the combination to some safe where, uh, Hüsker Dü is imprisoned or something.
Click.
“Yeah, what?”
“Oh, shit. Were you asleep?” Ziggy’s performing a sort of baton twirl–type thing with his pencil. “My sense of time’s a mess. Sorry.”
“I wish.” Calhoun exhales.
“But I was calling to interview you for my magazine. And you’re probably too wrecked right now, so . . .” Ziggy reaches behind him and slides Hüsker Dü’s Zen Arcade into the tape deck. It blasts on. He turns it down.
“That’s okay.” Calhoun’s obviously lighting a cigarette, so maybe it is, like, okay. “What do you want to . . .? Wait.” His lighter scratch-scratches. “So . . . I get kind of belligerent in interviews.”
Ziggy writes Calhoun’s first name across the top of the page in huge letters. “When were you interviewed before?”
“For jobs. You know.”
“Well, this’ll be cooler than that, I hope, ha ha ha.” Ziggy finishes writing the N.
“It’d have to be.”
“Yeah.” Ziggy’s still laughing. “So, uh, let me start with some background. You’ve probably told me before, but say it again for the record. Slowly, ’cos I’m copying everything down. Uh . . . do you consider yourself a, like, victim of sexual abuse, or just of abuse in general? When you were a kid, I mean.”
Calhoun chuckles. “Hm.”
“Wasn’t your mother an alcoholic or something?”
“Sort of, but . . . is that what you mean?”
Ziggy’s transcribing. “Well, it fucked you up.”
“I guess,” Calhoun says. “But my mom’s all right.” He takes a drag. “I think that, mm . . . ‘substance abuse’ runs in my family. So I understand her side of things, and she’ll probably understand mine, if I tell her.”
“Well, you’re obviously a great person. So she didn’t really ruin you too much.”
Calhoun snorts. “Thanks.”
“Yeah, no problem.” Ziggy laughs nervously. “Wait a second, I’m . . . writing . . . Okay, cool.”
“So I decided to quit.” Calhoun takes a drag, probably waiting for Ziggy to ask him, “Quit what?” But by the time Ziggy gets it, Calhoun adds, “Quit heroin.”
“Really? When?” Ziggy writes “Calhoun quits” in block letters.
“Today. I’m gonna take my last shot in a minute.”
“God, that’s great. But . . . Why, or . . . ?”
“Because it’s fucking me up. I can’t write. My arms . . . are just dead. I have to shoot in my hands, and they’re swollen.” Calhoun clears his throat. “I look . . . deformed.”
&
nbsp; “I’ll come stay with you while you’re quitting.” Ziggy throws down the pencil. “’Cos I hear it’s pretty hard. I can, like, get your cigarettes and cook you food and stuff. If that’s cool.”
“If you want to. But . . . you have to leave me alone if—”
“No problem. I’ll just . . . work on my magazine or something. God, Calhoun. That’s . . . I love you so much, and . . . yeah, it’s been scary to see you . . . subdued. Is that the right word? I mean, you’re always, always amazing to be around, but . . . Well, you’ll be happier, right?”
Calhoun chuckles. “I don’t know about that. But at least I’ll have orgasms. See, when you’re on heroin, sex isn’t . . . mm, a priority.”
“I heard,” Ziggy says. “Sounds kind of, uh . . . peaceful, ha ha. ’Cos sex just ruins everything. Look where it’s gotten me.”
“Yeah.”
“I guess if I could have sex with somebody I loved . . . Well, I sort of love Roger. Maybe. And Nicole’s okay, but . . .” Ziggy reaches over and plucks the Polaroid of Calhoun and him from the night table. “Anyway, the person I really, really love is, like, a straight guy, so . . . so . . .” He smiles at the image. “Thanks a lot, pal.” That’s just a joke, but, realizing what he actually said and to whom, Ziggy slams the receiver against his ear.
“Jesus . . . ,” Calhoun says. “Is that something you think about a lot?”
“About us sleeping together?” Ziggy holds the Polaroid close to his face, and squints into his best friend’s eyes. They’re greenish blue specks with teensy-weensy black bull’s-eyes.
“Yeah.” Calhoun takes a drag.
“No, no, no.” Ziggy checks out his own little eyes, which are blissed like an infant’s. “It’s just, uh, weird that I find, like, the person I most care about in the world, not sexually or anything, and you’re straight. Maybe that’s how it’s supposed to be, though.”
“So you’ve decided you’re gay?” Calhoun takes a drag.
Try Page 10