Frisk: A Novel (Cooper, Dennis) (4 page)

TENSE

1969-1986

When I was thirteen ...

Saturday afternoons I'd ride my ten-speed downtown and see matinees, usually horror films. I can't remember their names anymore, since they were never the point of my trips. I'd tune in, then recount their plot twists to my parents at dinner to explain how I'd wasted my day. But as soon as the credits rolled I'd be outside, hunched over, unchaining my bike.

A couple of blocks off the main boulevard in a row of Salvation Army-styled junk shops was a nondescript storefront called Gypsy Pete's, full of sex magazines, run by an old, unshaven alcoholic. Pete kept a few comic books near the register for kids. But when the usual customers cleared out, he'd let me browse through the hard-core material. I'd be looking at two naked, tangled adults. Suddenly Pete would yell, "Hey, twerp," which was the prearranged signal for me to return to the comics.

Pete used to talk drunkenly about how many women he fucked and how easily. I didn't believe him because he was ugly. He swore he'd been cute as a teen. One day he showed me a picture of him in the army or something in which he looked better but not good enough to get laid very much.

I thought he'd throw me out if I got near the gay porn, confined to a sleek, revolving rack near the register. So I'd browse in that area, glancing occasionally at the things on the rack. If I hung around long enough, Pete would go into the store's little toilet to shit. Those were my minutes to flip through the magazines. Once I thought Pete was heading off for his usual shit, but he was just taking something new out of the stockroom. I got caught with my hand on a copy of Muscular Boy. He didn't blink. "Skin's skin" was his philosophy.

Pete trusted me since I nodded along to his bull. So he started to show me the gay stuff before putting it on the rack. For the most part this stuff starred young hustler types, heavily tattooed, being fucked behind little black rectangles. Some dispensed with the rectangles. In a few, hustlers were tied up. Other hustlers, sometimes johns, pawed their crotches and spanked them while they pretended to scream.

Each Saturday Pete would produce a few new articles and let me sit in the stockroom with them for as long as I liked. At some point I realized he meant I could jerk off in peace, so I usually would, with a magazine spread on my knees, left hand holding a Kleenex, right hand turning the pages or jerking myself.

It stayed so dark in that stockroom I couldn't tell what time it was. Sometimes I'd be there for hours and not know. He'd yell, "Closing, twerp," which meant it was eight o'clock. I'd pedal home and tell my furious parents I liked the movie so much I'd stayed to see it a third or fourth time.

I was having sex with other kids by this point. None let me tie them up, but I remember one boy would hold his ankles together, pretending I'd captured him. Then I could spank him extremely lightly until he confessed some sort of secret, such as ... Oh, who cares anymore.

One day Pete asked if I liked the slapping and spanking parts of the magazines best. I said yeah (and I actually did), so he pulled out more violent things, with nipple clamps, handcuffs, and dildos being standard equipment. Normal sex acts had disappeared from these shots. Still, I didn't complain in case he was hoarding items that held some new, even sexier world of ... whatever.

I don't think Pete was after me physically. He never barged in. If he needed something out of the storeroom, he'd stand outside and yell, "Entering," then give me a couple of seconds to zip up or wipe myself off before he lifted the curtain that separated our worlds.

The last time I stopped by, Pete acted upset. Usually he'd make a few lame innuendos, pull out a new batch of stuff, and toss it over the counter to me. This time he started to say something, paused, muttered to himself. I didn't know what to do, so I wandered around the store seeing which magazines had been bought and which hadn't.

Pete motioned me to return to the front. "I have something to show you," he said. "But I don't know if I should." He squinted. "How old are you?" He'd always told me to tell any customer who might ask that I was eighteen, so that's how I answered. "No, no," he said, "I mean really." I told him I was thirteen. He closed his eyes for a second, swore, then asked me very slowly, like someone was forcing him, "Do you want to see items that might scare you a little?" I'd just seen a creature from outer space tear apart buildings, etc., so I said sure.

I followed him into the stockroom. I sat in the usual piss smelling armchair. He reached up on one of the shelves and brought down a small stack of photos. Before he handed them to me he said, "If you don't understand these, we can talk. I'll be . . ." He pointed at the curtain, dropped the photo set into my lap. I looked up. I was totally alone and the curtain was settling back into place.

I didn't understand what was happening in the pictures at first, but after three or four I realized that the model was dead and not laughing or yelling like I'd originally thought. He was lying faceup on a bed. His wrists and ankles were tied with heavy rope, and there was a rope around his neck that I imagined had killed him. His eyes and his mouth were wide open. That's why I'd thought he was laughing. He was pale, cute, and had long, straight black hair. There was nobody else in the photos with him. -

- - - - - - - - -- - - - In the last couple of photos somebody had rolled the boy over, so we could see what he looked like on both sides, I guess. That's when I knew for sure he was dead because instead of an asscrack, he had a crater. It looked as if someone had set off a bomb in his rectum.

I studied the crater calmly for a minute or two before it shocked me. Then I set down the photos extremely gently. I parted the curtain, walked down an aisle and out the front of the store without speaking to Pete, because I couldn't. I remember Pete came to the doorway and stood there fidgeting, watching me unchain my bike. I climbed on, pedaled off. When I was about a half block down the street, I heard him yell, "Wait," then, "Stop that boy," like he thought, or else wanted people to think, that I'd stolen something.

When I was seventeen ...

My boyfriend Julian worked in a gay massage parlor called Selma's. For something like a hundred dollars plus tip he'd have sex with a client, the wilder or more complex the proposed activity, the bigger Julian's tip. Being eighteen, adventurous, and pretty, he raked it in. That and the money I'd steal from my parents kept us in drugs and alcohol most of that summer.

Julian had slitty brown eyes, big lips, and the tip of his nose turned up. Brown hair, shoulder length. He was slender, bony, and his skin was the color of steamed glass. He owned about three hundred different T-shirts, most of them printed with rock bands' or products' names. Jeans or cut-offs. Tennis shoes, no socks. I dressed in a similar style, but my hair's wavy, and just sort of clogs up when I grow it out. I was four inches taller than Julian, which would put him at, say, five foot eight and a half.

My only photo of Julian was shot by a client at Selma's. He's gagged and tied up in a fetal position. His ass is covered with flowery handprints. From the thighs down and rib cage up, he's very fuzzy. Still, from what you can see of his face it's obvious why someone would have paid to do something like that to him.

One night we got totally fucked up on mescaline. Too high, in fact, to go into the world. But you need stuff to do when you're that drugged, so Julian phoned this cute hippie he'd met and asked the guy to get stoned and have sex with us.

When Henry came by he was already so zonked on something we had to undress him, which made for some interesting sex, but there was a quality about him that nagged me the whole time. I kept thinking I'd met him or that he was famous or ... something. Eventually I figured it out. Henry looked spookily like the model I'd seen with his asshole blown open at Gypsy Pete's four years before. I started calculating right there, while we were eating him out, etc., how I could ask.

Then Julian accidentally dropped Henry's forehead on the edge of the coffee table. He wasn't hurt though, just confused for a second.

We'd pretty much figured him out, so when he said, "I'm not bleeding, but maybe I should split," Julian, acting as our spokesman, agreed. Henry was at the front door, negotiating the sill, when I managed to ask if he'd ever made pornos. I think Julian was in the kitchen or bathroom.

Henry stopped, wheeled around. "What do you mean by pornos?" He seemed sober all of a sudden.

"Magazines, photographs," I said. I grinned like it wasn't important whether he answered or not.

"Yeah, why?" He rested his weight on the doorframe.

I told him about the photos I'd seen of a boy with his asshole blown open.

Henry started grinning as soon as I mentioned the wound. "You saw those?" he said. "Really? I never saw those. Do you still have them, because ... ?"

I shook my head, but I don't think he was paying attention to me at that moment. He looked very dazed and excited or something.

"... Man, that's funny," he concluded.

I tried to look like I thought it was funny too. Maybe it was. "You seemed dead in them," I said.

"Oh, I used to do anything if somebody was nice to me. I was with that photographer guy for a while, and he took lots of pictures of me. I didn't know he was turning me into a business, at least not at first. Most of the shots were just me jerking off. I was stoned all the time. But those were bizarre, those dead ones."

Maybe because he was so overwrought, Henry looked different in some way-older, less sexy, but easier to be with. "Do you remember how you did it?" I asked. "I mean how you or the photographer made that wound look so real?"

"Wait," Henry said. "Describe the pictures to me because we did a bunch of different ones."

I did, very colorfully, the way I'd described the images to myself while jerking off. Spoken aloud, the descriptions seemed much more pretentious, ridiculous, amoral ... something, than they'd ever been in the secret, uncritical world of my fantasies. But Henry didn't care how sexily I described the idea of him dead. He just listened and nodded like I was giving him directions to the next town.

"It was makeup," he said. "And I think some dyed cotton glued on, but I'm not sure because I was lying on my stomach, and it took him hours to get the thing right. Strange man, but nice. I was probably in love with him. In fact I'm sure I was." He smiled and shook his head, one of those funnyhow-life-is shakes. "Anyway, I almost forgot. Shit. I'm going to ask you my standard question now, so get ready. Uh, if you could change one thing about the way I acted back when we were having sex, what would that be? Be honest." He grinned.

I thought for a second. "Well, I'd want you to be less stoned."

Henry shook his head. "Yeah, obviously. I mean besides that."

I couldn't think of anything. "No, I guess not."

"Oh, really? Thanks a lot. That's nice." He looked shocked. "So, uh, call me sometime," he said like he meant it, but I guess he didn't.

"I might." I think if he'd stayed or if I'd called him, maybe he could have answered some questions about those images that went on to completely direct or destroy my life in a way. That's what I've realized now. At the time I just waited for him to take off. Once he had, Julian and I compared notes.

When I was eighteen ...

Julian moved to France with an older man he met at Selma's. Occasionally I'd get a postcard. Even before the move I'd started spending time with Julian's kid brother, Kevin, a devastatingly cute twelve-year-old with psychological problems. Julian had always kept a lot of distance from him for that reason.

Physically he was a Julian replica, only shorter, and sort of too pretty. He had this violent effect on me, something like comic book characters probably have on stoned kids. I'd fantasized drawing him into our sex life, despite his size and behavior, because he was outwardly perfect.

One day I'd hitchhiked over to visit Julian, as per routine. Kevin had answered the door. He said Julian was out. I asked what he, meaning Kevin, was up to. Nothing, he said, and led me dutifully up to his room.

The room was weird, almost empty apart from a bed and an overstuffed bookcase. I remember I asked about that. He said it was so he could redecorate in his head. That first day, for instance, he said the room had been a submarine stuck on the floor of the ocean, at least until I showed up. We talked about that and other stuff until Julian arrived a few hours later, drunk and rich.

After Julian moved away, I'd visit Kevin. We'd do drugs and talk, usually about Julian, whom Kevin admired to the point of psychosis, I thought, until one day I realized his love was more than familial. I tried to pin Kevin down. He eventually confessed to being "in love" with his brother, but claimed nothing had "happened" between them. To me the idea of them being in love was erotic. So I kept steering our repartee back to his Julian fantasies, which were incredibly sketchy as I recall.