Busy Monsters

by William Giraldi

  “You’re not preverbal!” I said.

  “Let’s chill, baby love,” Lombardo told her. “Charlie is damaged and lacking perspective. We need to show him affection now, not violence. Be like Bambi.”

  Vigorously I nodded to show my support for this view.

  “He doesn’t mean any of that morality garbage anyway,” she said. “He’s saying it only because it’s what his readers want to hear, because he wants to be the loftier character among all of us.”

  “Not true,” I said, “not true. I can write anything I want, any version of events, any at all. Why would I be saying this now if I didn’t actually believe it? I could tell you three what you want to hear right now, and then just alter my dialogue before publication to paint myself as Mr. Moral. You see? It must be genuine.”

  She was already busy with a tube of lubricant, lathering her backside and the other Mimi’s, too. Lombardo was seated splayed on the shoulder-press machine, pumping himself up in preparation for their (our?) launch in the next room. I thought that by changing the subject to bodybuilding I might buy myself some time, figure out how I’d flee from what would certainly be the mortifying experience of copulating with these three cranks. The unholy bulge in Lombardo’s spandex had increased from a soda can to a twelve-inch semolina bread loaf. My T-shirt was damp and getting damper.

  “So, Richard, tell me now, how does one achieve your physique?”

  “First: be born with the genetics of a freak. Without those, you cannot advance. Second: become a scientist and turn your body into a project. Drugs are key, babe. I am supplied with the finest chemicals science has invented. They’re over there, on top of the cabinet. I like to keep them in plain view for motivation.”

  He pointed to the scores of ampoules, syringes, and pill bottles, and explained. Those to the left were mass-building magic, oil-based drugs: Sustanon 250, Deca-Durabolin, Anadrol, Dianabol, and so forth. Those to the right were precontest cutting drugs and diuretics, all of them water-based: Winstrol-V was the best. It burned as it went in, babe. Also, locked in the cabinet was GH, growth hormone, extracted from the pituitary glands of the dead. Only the architects at Los Alamos would understand that shit—it’s like going from uranium to plutonium—it builds a better blast. He said I wasn’t ready for that intel.

  “I should say not,” and for some reason I uttered that line with an Englishman’s accent—Devonshire, say. I was also just then looking for somewhere to sit down but was terrified that if I sat on a muscle machine I might be expected to make the weights rise.

  “You must train like a rabid animal, with spit and sweat and blood and screams. Muscle doesn’t want to grow, so you must shock your system out of stasis. Only a handful of champions in the world can train like this. Heavy weight and low reps build mass; light weight and high reps make rips. Diet is key: I consume eight thousand calories per day, most of it from fat and protein. The misunderstanding is that fat causes fat. It does not: carbohydrates cause fat. I’ll tell you one thing, Charlie: Gillian would never have left me.”

  If Lombardo had been another mortal—that gnome from the Philippines, maybe, Casey Gonzales—I would have retaliated with kung fu and perhaps, given the conversation, sadism, too.

  But I could say only, “Okay, that stabbed me in the chest vicinity, a place already bombed to dusty rubble by kamikaze pilots. Must you? I mean, please, be kind, Richard.”

  “I’m talking about manhood here, babe. Look at me”—he was still pumping up his basketball deltoids on the shoulder-press machine—“I am what the Greeks imagined. I am Achilles and Atlas, Hercules and Adonis. Look behind you at the two Mimis pleasuring each other on the bed”—and by Jove, they were, with tongues flapping—“and tell me you don’t want to be us. Those girls, and my other girls, will not abandon me, not while I give them pure, mainlined manliness—”

  “You’re paying them.”

  “That’s not the point. I pay them but simultaneously deny myself to them in any other way. That’s the key to human sexuality, Charlie, what Sade—not Freud, mind you—understood above all: the forbidden. You weren’t forbidden to Gillian—a husband is not forbidden—but the squid hunter was. Get many girls and forget about the one. Matrimony is not in nature.”

  “Neither are porcelain toilets but I quite prefer them to squatting on sticks.”

  The mention of porcelain toilets made his face crinkle into a remark that meant: What kind of cretin mentions a toilet at a time like this?

  “I’m talking about the emotional element, Rich. Aren’t you forgetting that? Human beings aren’t androids. It’s all I can do to give emotional attention to one woman, never mind two or six or twelve. Plus your manliness is artificial, injected not inspired. And by the way, we’re turning into mouthpieces here for the views of an author, which is exactly how Sade wrote, which is to say, execrably.”

  “Everyone’s a mouthpiece for something or other,” he said, “even if only himself. You lost me with that talk of emotions a minute ago, but I will agree that humans aren’t androids. They are, however, animals, and let me tell you a little scientific fact, because, as you know, I am a scientist.”

  And here’s the fact Lombardo so graciously passed me: If a male bull is housed in a pen—or penned in a house—with a female in heat, he will fornicate once or twice with her, but no more. He’s not tired, nor has the female affronted his bullness; he has merely lost interest. Now, if you introduce a different female in heat, the bull will get keyed up and pleased once again and fornicate several more times. But then his bullness will lose interest again, and the process has to be repeated. If you try to reintroduce that first female back into the pen, even with eyeliner, a scarf, and a spray of perfume, the genius bull knows, he cannot be conned, and so he ignores her. The same is true for horses and goats and other barnyard beings with nothing else to do but stand around and piss in dirt.

  Lombardo said, “I’m talking about the need for variety that permeates all of nature, us included. Please respond, babe, go ahead.”

  It was surprising I could pay attention to Lombardo’s theories, what with the slurps, mutters, and assortment of moans emanating from Mimi Squared. I doubted any progress could have been made had I told Lombardo that a man is not a bull—well, most—and that during my tenure with Gillian I never for a flash lusted after another lady. He would have no doubt replied that I was not a real man, then—my sole quandary and the reason I had mislaid Gillian in the first place. Charles Homar the tennis player: I anticipated Lombardo’s little green projectiles of anti-logic and was somewhat proud of myself for doing so and keeping mum. Devil knows how hard it was.

  Still, I needed a way out of this pickle or else it would be proven to me just what a remorseful display of sexuality I really was. Lombardo’s pink eggplant would have made my own member look like a clitoris or smaller, and I was hesitant even to ponder how those two maenads would devour me in a ritual of vampirism and vice. Whatever vestiges of excitement I had felt thirty minutes earlier had evaporated and been replaced by an exhaustion and sudden dread of vagina. Perhaps they were right: I was not a real man, but an article far behind or else off to the side.

  And then it fell into my head from on high, the perfect diversion, the question that could put the kibosh on this humiliating exercise, a ritual of late—although, yes, I knew also that it might get me wounded irreparably.

  “Richard,” I said, “don’t you think this whole bodybuilding lifestyle is a little…you know…gay?”

  He let the machine smash down, eyeballed me in the mirror (I was sitting behind him on a padded bench), stood very deliberately, with peacock threat, turned ever so slowly, latched eyes with mine, and asked, “What did you say?”

  “You know. Bodybuilding. It’s kind of…gay.”

  “Gay as in stupid or gay as in homosexual?”

  “Yeah, that’s right.”

  “That’s right what? Which one?”

  “Homosexual. Did you know, Rich, that Sade would have his va
let bugger him? That crazy Sade. Maybe he lifted weights, too.”

  If a look could raise the dead, happy Lazarus would have jumped up through the floor.

  “You have about one minute to explain yourself, Charles. Because, among the significant differences between you and me, one is that you’ve only attempted to kill a man, while I myself have massacred many. Start talking.”

  I sat back and crossed my legs, woman-like.

  “Well, it’s nothing, really, I was just sitting here thinking as you worked out. You know, how similar a bodybuilder is to the average young female in summer: hairless, suntanned, obsessed with the body and with food, always looking in the mirror, yearning for the esteem and attention of men. I mean, all that time spent with nearly naked men in the gym and onstage. I can imagine it now, the gym life: a clique of hairless men in spandex harpooning each other’s buttocks with needles, massaging the painful cramps out of each other’s deltoids and quads, positioning each other into poses before the mirror, lying naked in the tanning bed, showering each other with compliments on muscle shape and density. It just all seems so, well, so femmy.”

  Surely this was the point at which Lombardo would demand I vacate the premises in a jiffy for insulting his muscled machismo, perhaps head-slap me and call me ingrate, maybe faggot, then say I’m lucky to be leaving on two legs that are not fractured compound-wise. He stood looking at me with a countenance that affirmed ambiguity outright. His straight line of a mouth, I saw, was starting to spread into a smile.

  “Oh no you don’t, Homar. Friend warned me that you might try some misbehavior in order to get out of being schooled. You almost had me there for a minute. Homosexuals! Ha! As if! Okay, now, stop the silliness, Mimi Squared is waiting for us,” and here he peeled down his spandex panties and made me eye-to-eye with his eel, which, if I remember rightly, winked at me.

  What magus would I beckon now? I felt so drained. Months of skirmish seemed just then to catch up with me and harden like concrete in my skeleton. I felt the pressing need to get monastic, take a vow, wear a robe. Our species swam laps in a cesspool and I needed pause, maybe a month-long siesta under a goose-down quilt in an Andes mountain town, tended to by kindly Sherpas. My T-shirt had gone from damp to wet; a fever rose from my feet to my cheeks. In several seconds I would be sobbing. Again.

  “Richard,” I said, “can I use your bathroom? I need to, you know, soap my scrotum.”

  “By all means, babe. It’s behind you. Then undress and join us. When we’re done I’m giving you a workout routine and a diet for victors. Soon you’ll be happy again, the word Gillian just an ancient grunt on the tongue of Neanderthalis.”

  With a locked door and water hissing from the spigot, I studied my face in that bathroom mirror and imagined my skull through the blanched and unmoisturized skin around it. My hair lay tousled and desperate for a trim—I looked like an American Christ—my teeth needed scouring, and a shave was overdue by a fortnight or more. I wet my face five or eight times and, propped up on the vanity with elbows locked, watched the drops dribble from the edge of my nose and disappear into the puddle at the drain.

  Some diabolical and depressed force had seeped into my being and demanded attention. It was a wonder my legs would work. Into the mirror my mouth admonished my face, “Charlie, go home now and find refuge. Sleep a long time, begin to pray. Remember the first century, fight off this flu.”

  I had a two-hour drive back to my condo in Connecticut, and for the first time in four months Gillian was not pushing unduly against my cerebellum or breastplate. Illness of any ilk can be corrective if one is willing to be corrected or else surrender. That’s what I was doing now, giving up and going home, perhaps never again to see Gillian Lee, a possibility with which I was, oddly, quite all right. Charles Homar had had enough. Ten years to Ithaca is far too many.

  When I came out of the bathroom that day—a splash transformed and still feeling faint—I saw that Lombardo and his Twins Attila had begun their sortie without me and, alas, didn’t seem to recall that I was present or care about the fact that I knew I would be fine on the earth from now on. Their saliva and body-fluid fest was in full swing, and I won’t describe the sight in case children come across these pages, but you can shift your own imagination into action and conjure for yourself the right-side-up and upside-down of what they were doing, and then, if you really want accuracy, add a pinch of depravity to your picture and imagine Vlad the Impaler making love to a couple of captured Ottoman gals.

  I left that palace and did not glance back lest I be turned to salt…or something worse.

  8. INTERLUDE

  WHISPER THIS (slowly, in earnest): Why do we do the things we do? How can we make sense of our lives in the belly of this madness? Do we suffer so much for wealth and renown, for the love of a boy or a girl or God? All this emptiness, within and without, and we here with a shovel between two nothings, trying to fill, and fill. Our silent Savior’s broken body: in that believe? How? Which way? Is it each way? But we can’t hold it. So in the lifetime of our discontent we worship one another and then wither when left. The paralytic on the corner will tell you: he longs for his legs. He used to feel such comfort when he shouted insults at the Lord, and the Lord, as patient as the grave (is the grave), said back: Oh, child, you just don’t understand. Meaning he one day might. Which he won’t.

  On Interstate 84, somewhere between Richie Lombardo’s Jersey pad and my Connecticut condo, my mother called to tell me that my father was gone, had died in the nighttime from a heart that said No, from a god that said Come. My thoughts—nay, my emotions, those niggling products of serotonin and dopamine run amok—were not with him, his spirit stuck to the ferryman now, boating from here across to Hades, but with her, my mother, this woman alone now, because dying means nothing to the dead. I said the words you say: I’m coming; it’s okay; don’t worry; I’ll take care of everything; he’s in a better place; I’m sorry I’ve been out of touch; I’m sorry.

  She was only slightly weepy with me on the phone, nor could I weep—not now—and this despite Sigmund’s certain claim that the death of the father is the single most monumental event in a man’s life. I could not think of him on ice in the morgue, or in the hearse en route to the funeral home for a bodyful of ethanol and formaldehyde, because all I could see was my mother alone in that house, perhaps on the sofa knitting something no one would ever wear. Did she have bridge partners? Had she ever played bridge before? And what, exactly, is bridge? I’ve never thought to inquire.

  Lashing up the highway in an SUV that was not mine (did the thing have insurance?), rushing to be at the side of a mother I was not worthy of and had not spoken to in weeks or seen in months, not even after the Maine authorities deemed me releasable from jail, my Gillian-inspired jaunt came down on me as ridiculous, I a dervish in rags wrapped around an outdated eros that squealed volumes about the lamebrained ass I was. Commonly selfish is what I’m saying and how I felt. The remorse was like the immolation of my entrails. I needed a shower and a massage. Maybe a haircut or an enema. (Replace that a with a y and I already owned enough of those, real and imaginary.) That truck must have had an astute autopilot because I remember nothing of the last fifty miles home.

  My mother was roosted at the kitchen table, swaddled by her two sisters, my obese aunties, experts in gluttony with beehived hairdos straight out of Grease, one of whom had once uninvited me to a Christmas meal because she said my memoirs were the work of Baal or else a roustabout recently concussed. (Always the aunts who cause the most trouble in a family. I told that aunt to relocate to Colorado Springs where the evangelical rabble would be gladsome to have her. “New England,” I said, “doesn’t want you.”)

  On this day both aunts creaked to their feet and hemmed me in with snivels and “Oh, Charlies” and “He was a good man,” and I espied my mom through their fleshy smothers. She was still sitting with a mug of coffee, smiling half a smile to show me that she was relieved I had arrived. I went to her and held her and
didn’t say anything, her shampoo more fragrant than grapefruit. Both aunts began whimpering behind us.

  “You’ve lost weight,” she said.

  “Yes. Prison and cross-country travel.”

  Aunt Chris had prepared a baked ziti and Aunt Pat had smacked together a lasagna. They attempted to spoon-feed me. Neither was Italian but both had married Italian men and liked to pretend, which was precisely how they had inflated to unlovable fatsos the blubber of whom could light the lamps of an Inuit family for a winter’s spell. Their dresses looked chaotically cut from curtains.

  My mother and I went out back and took a seat in the sunbeams at a picnic table my father had purchased from Home Depot even though I told him I could build one for half the cost. (“You couldn’t build a table with Legos,” he said, and just to prove him wrong I built my own with Friend’s help and the thing now sits splintered and unused in a backyard it takes up half the square footage of.)

  “You’ve been busy,” she said. “You and your monsters.”

  How did she manage to look so unafflicted and healthful when my father and her sisters were the very snapshots of human debris? Her pink and white running shoes were fresh from the mall.

  And how should that conversation have gone exactly? Some souped-up suburban realism is what it was, with lines like, “Are you doing okay, Mom?” and “Will you be all right with money?” Someone said something about Bartholomew—ahh, the dead kid brother as literary trope—and I think I might have accused my father of not really liking me, to which my mother probably said that he wasn’t the Great Santini. I had accidentally abandoned my sunglasses on Richie Lombardo’s sofa that morning; the lambent world injured my eyes and made me squint. My mother, however, appeared as if she had been born in sunlight. The grass around us needed mowing; the shed could have used sanding and a new coat of paint; insistent weeds sprouted from between the cracks in the patio. (And never mind that the patio should not have had cracks in it to begin with, if only my father had listened to me and hired the skilled mason Friend had recommended instead of the career con man he had chosen at random from the yellow pages. Any info or advice that came from me was immediately discarded, damned.)