Badbadbad

by Jesus Angel Garcia

  At the edge of the frame, a man with a plastic bag on his head like a hood leans against a wall. His arms are outstretched, his palms open. No one’s paying him any mind. When we got closer, Cyrus told him to scrounge for handouts elsewhere. I remember challenging Cyrus’ tone. That’s when he explained the arrangement with the cops. Still, I called him out on his attitude. He said he didn’t mean any harm. We each coughed up a buck. No hard feelings.

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  Closeup of a large brass paten piled high with multicolored pills, including pinks and baby-blues, three spliffs the size of small cigars, a baggy packed with whitish powder, a liter of Jim Beam and a pint of Fernet-Branca, an Italian liqueur making the rounds as the latest “hipster aperitif.” That’s what Bebe called it as we toasted the launch of the first night’s revelry. I remember this well. The drink was nasty, Jägermeister-rank. It looked like motor oil, tasted like cough syrup and industrial waste with a funky herbage aftertaste that made me shiver. I could only swill a couple shots with ginger backs before switching to Kentucky’s finest.

  I can’t say how much I grazed on this platter of intoxicants, but whatever cocktails I mixed got me where I needed to go. Cyrus was pleased to see I’d given up my straight-edge ways. What are friends for?

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  Me and Cyrus leaning away from each other in contorted poses, our faces squished up like we’d been whiffing Fernet! Each of us has one arm extended with the hand raised, as if pushing each other away, while the index finger of the other hand points at our own chests. This photo was taken during a debate on the definitive epitaph for our generation.

  “Fashionably Dissed & Franchised,” Cyrus said. “Branded at birth like mad cows, feeding on our own entrails, doped up to keep on killing, shopping and praying.”

  “Picture the OVA pitch.” I flapped my wings. “Generation YouBeMe: if you wanna be kewl like me, you need to listen to my music, play my video games, watch my DVDs, wear my designer threads, know the song and artist on my ringtone. See me on Myspace. Maybe I’ll friend you back.”

  We stand by our positions.

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  In profile, two bob-haired girls, total strangers to me, tongue-kissing. I snapped this pic. I remember now, I couldn’t believe it when they agreed to let me pose them. Bent at the waist, chests and asses pushed out, hands on tight cheeks barely covered by cut-off jeans, arms akimbo like wings, they could be busty gargoyles or a prep-school boy’s masturbation fantasy. They’re wearing loose striped ties, white dress shirts, untucked, half unbuttoned, black bras.

  Sitting Buddha-legged beneath them on the floor is Cyrus. That fucker. He weaseled his way into the shot, crawled between my legs while I was framing it. His eyes are closed. He’s grinning like the cat in a (cowboy) hat. I should have slapped him.

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  Joy. Cyrus and Bebe’s beautiful friend. She was in charge of quality control on fallenangels. We would come to work closely together in the months ahead. She told me how she’d regularly scan the profiles with software she’d written herself and give the boot to any scammers, spammers, pedophiles or goat lickers lurking in the community. She would also issue one-time warnings to users who had been singled out as potentially dangerous or, as she put it, “complete assholes.” The fallenangels were a tolerant group, so to be flagged by at least a dozen members meant acting way out of line.

  In the photo, we’re collapsing into each other’s arms with bubbly smiles like we’d been best friends since childhood. We were probably just trying to stay vertical after Bebe pushed us together for the picture. I may have made a move to kiss her. No, I only thought about it.

  Joy reminded me of a female Cyrus. Like him, she was long-limbed, light-haired, mid-twenties, fond of cowboy hats and into all kinds of music and art. Her father was also a preacher. She’d come down here from Richmond to study at Bliss U, but she quit halfway into her third year. I don’t recall her saying why. She met Cyrus at an art class she’d sat in on and he introduced her to the local underground. That’s how she got involved with the web site.

  She’s a self-made tech goddess, MENSA level, Bebe or Cyrus had said. I remember feeling jealous when I heard this, but not for long. Tingly all over, I was in no condition to bring myself down. It helped when she groaned about her dead-end part-time gig in online ad sales. Her job doesn’t jibe with her identity. But who am I to judge?

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  Cyrus showing me how to spin my Savage like a cheerleading soldier. He’d introduced me to the local shooting gallery earlier that week. Toward the end of our time there, I started to pop the targets. In the photo I’m standing opposite him with a drink in my hand, shoulders hunched, brow knitted, trying to track his technique. There’s a crowd around us in a sloppy circle. He seems thrilled to be the center of attention, his face serious, an ironic curl at the edge of his lips and eyes. When it was my turn, I dropped the gun twice in midtwirl. It wasn’t loaded. The spectators hoot ‘n’ hollered. Whatever.

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  Me grinding with a stranger about Bebe’s height, though of a smaller build, more girly. She’s rocking on my thigh between her legs. My fingers hooked in her belt loops, I’m gazing at the dandelions on her short-shorts winking up at me. Her arms are in the air, head tilted back in the shadows of ecstasy. Her black T-shirt, form-fitted with the sleeves rolled up, reads LOVE IS STRONG AS DEATH. Yeah, I remember tugging on the collar, nibbling on her neck. I shouted over the deep house beats: “I’d be happy to die inside of you!” My best-ever come-on.

  She said something like . . . “Every love, like every time you come, gives and takes so much out of you, out of me, out of God.”

  “In and out,” I reminded her, calling up images of hamburgers and whores, the ex, A Clockwork Orange.

  “What brings us closer pushes us away,” she said.

  “Not if we hold on,” I said.

  She soon let go, floating off into the waves of music. I wonder how she would have liked it if we’d made it in the Petting Zoo.

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  I’m squatting in a corner, face down. There’s a tinsel halo in my hair. Light from a lamp on the ledge above me stains everything red. My jeans, boots and the leather band on my wrist appear to be wet, blood-soaked. My wife beater looks like ghostly armor. My arms are truncheons, the knuckles of my fist shotgun shells, the drink in my hand a grenade.

  I must have been thinking on the ex and my son, how neither one was in my life, and I was to blame.

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  Cyrus and another bare-chested guy, who may be the drummer from Children’s Crusade. They’ve got a skinhead in a shoulder lock. I didn’t witness this brawl, but Bebe told me later how Cyrus and some others thwarted a carload of Klan kin from crashing the party.

  With arms pinned above his head and mouth ajar, the white boy looks like he didn’t know what hit him. His posture and facial expression recall that of a chimpanzee. A shadow across his upper lip gives him a Hitler moustache. I wish I’d had a hand in this fun.

  Cyrus is badass, though he’d say there’s no joy in violence. I keep telling myself this. But the way the world is now, ever was and will be, it seems inevitable: we’re bound and gagged by our own self-destruction.

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  Another exterior shot of the CC warehouse. The night of Gay Pride. I was gone by the time we got to the door. In the photo, there are colorful streamers on the windows and U.S.A. #1 = WBW spraypainted in black across one of the walls. By dawn, the message would be turned into UNIVERSAL SACRED ARTS #1 = WORLD BETWEEN WORLDS. This was Shea’s idea, open to interpretation.

  Cracking her bullwhip, she urged partygoers to transform the vandalism into “conscious propaganda” (I believe that’s what she called it) by hand-painting the new words in columns spun off from the graffiti. We were instructed to use a rainbow of colors, as I recall. I think I painted the R in SACRED, though it could have been in ARTS or one of the WORLDS. My specia
lly mixed, in-between shade was a combo of red, orange, yellow, brown and black. I remember how my letter looked like a running man and nearly disappeared into the wall. I bet he’s still on the run.

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  Bebe crowning me with Cyrus’ plastic thorns. I’m frowning like a terrible two-year-old. After the rally I’d changed back into my street gear, but she wouldn’t let me be. She said I was making myself an outsider on purpose. Fate is fate, I say. But everyone else at the Playpen would be in costume, so Cyrus donated his headdress, which Bebe garlanded with silk flowers she’d sweet-talked from a girlfriend. She capped my makeover with Mardi Gras beads and insisted on dotting my cheeks with eyeliner. I look like Raggedy Nero in T-shirt and jeans. Burn, baby, burn.

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  Cyrus’ creation. There’s Bebe in her pink kitty outfit with her girlfriend, a blue poodle, blowing kisses at the camera. They’re fused at the tail, unfurling a rosy banner stamped with the words LOVE IS FREE. I’m on my back on the floor. They’ve each planted a combat boot on my chest. I’m licking Bebe’s calf. I’m sure she tasted just right. I wish I could remember.

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  A closeup of me in mid-disco. One of those freeze-frames posterity could do without. Lips poofed, hands on hips, pelvis thrust forward. I may be on my toes. It’s unclear if I’m dancing with myself or my partner’s outside the frame. I have little recollection of this as well. Some things are better that way.

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  This is Lil_Girl. I found her on fallenangels. She said she needed a daddy. “I’ve been a bad bad girl,” she wrote in her profile. “Daddy is going to be mad at me for being a dirty little slut. He’s going to punish me, tie me up, spank me all over. . . . I deserve to be punished. I’m ready, daddy. Tell me a bedtime story about love and family. If your words are good enough, maybe we can make them real! I need a young daddy with game. Attractive face, strong body, not small, no older than thirty years.”

  She was forty-three herself, though much younger-looking with her strawberry blond pigtails and petite yoga body. When I first read her pitch, I couldn’t help thinking about where she’d come from, how she’d gotten here, the back alleys along the way. I imagined a chain of brutality that bound her to the hurt. I saw her locking herself into strangleholds where she had no say, no free will, no chance to reclaim what’s hers. And now she’d found a way out, maybe back to herself.

  At first it felt wrong to even read her words. But that’s judgment. She knew what she was doing when she joined fallenangels. She would be in charge now, perhaps for the first time. And I could be there for her, let her be my little girl. I could try at least. Her request would attract the ugliest suitors. Better me than them.

  So I tossed off a sleepytime tale of family as a house of bondage, a house of worship, in which each member was a room where the others would go to pay homage by doing their worst, knowing they would get theirs next. The marriage of sex and violence was sanctified by the Scriptures: a cycle of torture, acceptance and vengeance, inescapable as death. Pleasure came from controlling and being controlled, giving in to no-control. The rules were clearly defined. There was touch, there was trust. No one went to bed hungry.

  In the photo she’s peering out between the bars of one of three cribs making the rounds at the Playpen. Battery-powered Christmas lights snake around the pine slats. She’s surrounded by a barnyard of stuffed animals: BooBoos, Care Bears, My Little Ponies. Rattles hang from hooks at the four corners. She’s sucking Fernet from a baby bottle. Some of the black liquid must have dribbled onto the Peter Pan collar of her blouse.

  She would only talk in character. “I love my daddy dear,” she’d say. “I’ll do whatever he tells me to. I know I’ve been bad, but I want to be better. Tell me what to do, daddy.” She was cute, like a girl, and I felt the need to protect her. But that’s not what she wanted.

  She whined for me to take her downstairs to the Petting Zoo, where dozens of glittery folks in various states of undress watched us in silence. She told me to tell her to suck it. “Suck it, Lil_Girl,” I said, feeling sick to my stomach.

  “Yes, daddy,” she said, her voice pipsqueaky like a Smurf.

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  This series of shots looks like something out of a Great America photo booth. It’s a toast to Gay Pride, to prove I’m not homophobic. Bebe must have put us up to it. Cyrus and me.

  In the first pic, you can see we’re lit up, high on broadmindedness. There’s a bashful glance between us that could be interpreted as flirting or the hopeful moment before upchucking when you still think you won’t.

  The second is in profile: fair-haired bulls about to bang horns.

  Finally, our lips meet, our eyes blocking out the noise of the world. A golden halo rings our heads. We seem innocent, powerful.

  I have to admit it’s a sweet image.

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  Cyrus is an urban cowboy. I’m wearing a paisley-stickered Kaiser helmet, plastic, with an aluminum spike on top. Each of us is on sentry duty with the Savage in hand. The cartridges were padlocked in a case in the F150, so no worries on fatal mishaps.

  Side by side, the photos resemble the profile portrait of gaytoast2. Bebe set up this parallel, she later said, “to illuminate the relationship between love and war.” Not that there’s any sex or violence for real. But you could say the suggestion’s there. Cyrus would claim a soldier, like animal lust or the human need for intimacy, is never at rest.

  I remember being alone outside the Playpen, training the scope on a pile of rocks down by the railroad tracks. Seeing the ex, I clicked the trigger pop pop pop. If only . . .

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  This one’s scary. It must have been a joke for Bebe’s amusement, it must have. We’re in the Petting Zoo. I’m naked on all fours, growling red-faced at the camera, a rubber ball-gag in my mouth. Cyrus is riding me like a jockey, leather crop in one fist, the other tugging at the gag strap. He’s naked as well. Too much information, bro?

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  Me and Cyrus climbing into the F150. Off-center, though roughly in the middle of the frame, he’s mounting the Savage on the gun rack. He insisted I let him drive. With his back to the camera, what you see through the glare of the windshield are his wings spread for flight, a wiry arm stretched toward the back of the cab, his father’s hands securing the rifle. On the left edge of the picture, the blue poodle is tugging my shirttail, her whiskers twisted in dismay. My face is shadowed by the truck. I remember exaggerating a laugh as I hurled the crown of thorns to Bebe, heaved myself into the shotgun seat.

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  I took these photos on my old cell phone. The quality is poorer than those from Bebe’s camera. But it’s the best I’ve got for snapshots of my son.

  Cyrus drove us to the ex’s place. We parked a couple blocks away. He let me load the rifle but he would carry it. “Just in case,” he said.

  We crept around the back of the house, a single-floor shack just shy of a trailer. The night was warm as usual, windows open wide. I used the light from the cell’s screen to peek into the rooms. We skipped the one from which we heard the ex’s daddy snoring, cracking on how he sounded like a farting goat. Cyrus had to shake me hard to shut me up. “Don’t make me slap you,” he said. “Prison’s no joke.” I told him I didn’t care.

  When I spotted the ex sleeping softly, her long dark hair splashed on the pillow like a blackhole sun, I saw for an instant how loving she was when we first met. Then I remembered all the ugliness between us.

  It started with the miscarriage. Understandably, she was destroyed, and I did everything I could to help, but she never recovered. Not a year later when we agreed to try again. Not a year after that when our son was born. Not anytime since. Nothing I ever did was good enough. I’m a monster, she’d say. And yet she’s the one who stole my
son from me.

  Cyrus butted me with the rifle when I tried to grab it. We could barely see inside the room. Not through the screen, the blinds, the sooty drapes. But I knew my son was there. I could feel it.

  I snapped these pictures that look like balled-up sheets in a bassinet, yet at the maximum zoom, you can see my son’s tiny pixelated fingers clutching his baby blanket. Cyrus said he hoped I wasn’t too let down we didn’t get the shot we’d come for. I told him we’d caught a glimpse, more than I could have banked on.

  He couldn’t see what I saw, but that was okay. This was my struggle, not his, what I needed to see to make it through another day.

  FIFTEEN

  The pictures of my son kept me going. I was confident I would see him again soon. I’d hold his little fingers as he took his first steps, lift him up onto my shoulders, high above the clouds, so he could gaze at the world through a giant’s eyes. I’d watch over him while he slept, listen to his baby breathing, keep the hell hounds at bay. The ex would have to give in eventually. My day in court would come.

  My attorney said there was still no word on a deal with the D.A. We were in the backlog and would have to wait our turn. Uncomfortable with sitting still, I urged him to do something. There had to be a course of action we could take to move forward.

  He said he would request a copy of the original custody agreement from the law in California. These papers would clarify my paternal rights, condemn the ex’s behavior as unreasonable, potentially criminal, and give us the legal muscle we’d need to either move jurisdiction to Gethsemane County or press the ex to uphold her end of the current arrangement. He also advised that I keep up my good work at the churches. This would speak well of my character and might curry favor with the local courts.