Frisk: A Novel (Cooper, Dennis) (5 page)

One day Kevin's mom called me up to say how happy she was about my friendship with Kevin, whom she'd "written off" after Julian left. He seemed more stable since knowing me, she said. In fact he'd told her he loved me as much as he'd ever loved Julian, which she thought was kind of sweet, I guess.

I drove right over. When he answered the door I said I wanted to fuck him. He hugged me all the way up the staircase, down the hall, into his room. I kicked the door shut, and kind of shoved him against it. His throat made a sound I'd never heard before. It was high-pitched, loud. At the same time his legs buckled. I saw the pre-collapse tremors, threw my arms around his waist, and just managed to hold him upright by the seat of his jeans. I walked him to the bed, dropped his body across it. He wouldn't let go of my shirt and tore a huge hole.

Technically, he was a know-nothing. He kept toppling or being knocked off the bed, scratching his elbows, knees, bruising things, spraining his arms, back, etc. After a month he got so much less attractive I had to imagine I'd just rescued him from a rapist, or was raping him myself, to get involved in the sex. He never knew, though.

If I had to describe Kevin using one word I'd say hysterical. It seemed to have something to do with insecurity, but he kept freaking out all the time, even after I spent hours trying to convince him I loved him, which I'd started to do, according to my loose, personal definition of that word.

Still, it's weird how removed I became from those problems. I mean, I've gotten totally removed from almost everyone now, as far as I can tell, but with him I surprised myself because I was still just a typical person at that point, I think. Being cold was the only way I could deflect all his ... emotion, whatever. I'm repeating myself.

When I was twenty-four ...

I wore black, cut my hair, dyed it black, took a lot of amphetamines, and renamed myself Spit. My second home was a punk club called Flintstones, housed in the shell of a pizza joint Julian and I had occasionally haunted. I went there on the weekends to look for somebody to love. That was a very unpunk thing to think about, but people did. I just acted on it.

I found Samson swaying around on the dance floor, separated from me by some pogo-ing kids. He was thin, tallish, big boned, with a perky Scandinavian face a little muddied by freckles and zits. His hair was dyed blue-black and stiffened with gel into twelve-inch-long strands, most of which were bunched up on the top of his head like a scorched bouquet.

When I met his eyes and imitated their unfocused stare he seemed to recognize something and stumbled in my direction.

He had an apartment nearby, one huge single room with seven double beds scattered around "for friends." The floor was an inch deep in handbills, underwear, T-shirts ... He stood in the middle and yanked off his shirt. I flopped on a random bed. His chest was a little too narrow and pockmarked. It was all information to me.

He unsnapped his jeans and pushed them halfway down the shaft of his cock before he stopped, grinned at it, then at me.

"When you only see this part," he slurred, pointing at the visible part of his cock, "you figure what's next is total godhead, right, Spit? But when you see what you get. . ." And he yanked down the jeans. They slid as far as his knees. "It's so ugly, the whole thing." He picked up the trio and shook them roughly. "Especially the cock." He held it up. "Ug-ly."

I told him something like, Hey, it's exactly the ugliness or whatever that makes cocks paradoxical and invaluable, blah blah blah, especially on really cute boys like himself. I said it suggested depth, poetry, seriousness ... I could be really pretentious back then.

He made a face like he didn't know what I was talking about, though he later confessed that the word "cute" is what helped him waddle toward me, jeans inching down his calves.

I grabbed his ass, pulled him close, sucked his cock, licked his balls, etc., while in the blurry upper edge of my vision his head wobbled and drooled like a surrealistic cloud.

Let's see ... It was weeks later. I'd started to drift off a lot during sex, which Samson didn't particularly notice. In reality I was caressing him. In my head I'd be grabbing objects off the night table, crushing his skull, then mutilating his body, especially his ass, while he tried to dissuade me from murdering him in a brain-damaged voice.

I used to worry that ideas like those would show up on my face, but it's too crude to register anything wilder than "I'm feeling happy" or "sad" or "pissed off" or "horny" or "scared."

One night I got Samson so loaded he walked like the carpet was quicksand or something. He couldn't speak, I don't think. I aimed him at the bed, where he fell. I knelt over his chest and gazed down at his face until it blurred. Then I punched it. Again. I sort of lost my way, I can't remember exactly. Things were breaking. Sometimes I'd catch one of Samson's eyes studying me, which I guess was a muscle reflex.

I should include some reaction shots here, I know, but I doubt I had many. I felt numb, blank, so my face probably followed suit. When the incident's over, long over, I'll try to sort out the boy and myself from the violence and feel anything. I'm not at that point yet.

For weeks afterward I expected police to show up at my apartment. When they didn't, I figured Samson was still alive but too mentally ruined to name names, or else his body was still sprawled there, rotting away, and nobody had missed him enough to check in.

One night I was drinking at Flintstones. The decor of that club was extravagant, a pseudo-cave with lifelike plaster stalactites and puddles of fake stagnant water. I was admiring it for the millionth time when I saw Samson pogo-ing a few yards away. There were still some bruises and cuts on his face, but since punks wore their physical damage like fashion accessories, he didn't particularly stand out.

I tried to disappear, but on my way to the exit our eyes accidentally met. I nodded, not knowing what else to do. He stopped dancing, held up one finger, as if to say, "Wait," then went back to his pogo-ing. First I froze. Then I moved out of the traffic flow and watched him gyrate. He didn't look angry. If anything, he seemed happier or something. Maybe I just saw him more sharply than before, since beauty wasn't distracting me. Or maybe I'd damaged some nerves, and his face had fewer directions to go in.

When the song ended, he strolled over. "God, Spit, the last time I saw you was so fucking strange." He grinned crookedly. "I was so out of it. And you were so weird."

I wanted to know what happened after I left.

"At first I was scared," he said. His face seemed confused, but there were too many new little wrinkles and details to tell. "I couldn't decide if I should go to the emergency room. Then I thought, Fuck it. I laid around, took drugs, watched TV, and pigged out for a month. It was fun. That's why I'm fat, if you noticed."

I said I had, now that he mentioned it. Then I asked if it bothered him.

"No way, Spit." He shook his head, then stopped, nodded. "Well, it did at first, okay, sure." He laughed, which made his scars really stand out. "But it was weird being cute. It's not as great as you think." He took a swallow of beer and leaned back on the wall of the cave. "So, no." Then his eyes got this icy, removed look I sort of expect in the people I fuck. "Not anymore."

When I was twenty-eight ...

After I lost it with Samson, I spent a few years avoiding serious, ongoing relationships as a precaution. The few times I had sex were one-night affairs with guys I'd never have to run into again. Mostly hustlers.

The hustler I remember best for some reason was a thin, heavy-metal-style teen standing along the so-called porn strip, a few city blocks not far from my apartment. He grabbed the crotch of his jeans as I drove by. I swerved to the curb. He ran up to the passenger window, leaned in. I asked if he wanted to "party." He named his price (I forget), I agreed, he joined me, we drove off.

He was almost exactly my type. The only flukes were his neck, which was quite long and thin, a crooked nose crusty with snot, and he may have had one lazy eye. He said his name was Finn. I had him spell it. He said he got that nickname because when he was younger he'd either resembled or acted like Huckleberry Finn. I said it was obviously "acted like" since his namesake was just a character in a book. But Finn said his copy had illustrations.

It wasn't that I didn't fantasize murdering hustlers. It's just that I tend to be too scared or shy the first few times I sleep with someone to do' what I actually want. The worst that could, and did, happen was I'd get a little too rough. But the hustler would stop me, or I'd stop myself, before things became more than conventionally kinky, as far as he knew.

My perfect type tends to be distant, like me. I don't mean matter-of-fact, I mean shut tight. Like he's protecting himself from other people or pain or both by excising himself from the world in every way, apart from the obvious physical stuff you need to get by such as walk, talk, eat, etc.

All the way home I kept turning to look at Finn's face. It was almost beautiful. He didn't even notice me studying, he was so uninterested or overly involved in himself.

Usually I'd offer hustlers a beer. We'd sit around, lie to each other, but as soon as I let Finn inside he asked, "Where's the toilet?" When he came out of the toilet, he said, "Let's get this over with." I'm trying to remember his voice. I just can't. He found my bedroom all by himself, and the bed, even though there was no light at all. Even I had some trouble negotiating the furniture and stuff.

I felt around on the bed until my hand held a foot. I sat down next to it. I rubbed it for a while, wondering what to do, say. AIDS was an issue by then, so I'm pretty sure I said I wanted to turn on the lamp and examine him, period, to which he relaxed or moved his foot in a way I understood to mean "fine" or "who cares?"

I flicked on a lamp and knelt over Finn's nude body. The smell off of him was intense, like leaning over a barbeque, only more subtle and hard to describe. I mean sweet, but kind of spoiled. Like there was something wrong with him, hidden away in there.

Finn was thin, tall, pale. He had so few hairs on his legs that I counted them. His buttocks were springy as balloons. His asshole looked like a photo I saw of a bullet hole. He had big, red, droopy balls. His cock was thin with a pointy head. Black pubic hair, thick and smelly. His ribs almost pierced through his chest and back. His nipples were tiny pink matterhorns. He was warm all over except for his ass, hands, and feet, which were freezing. If you held out his arms at a particular angle you could fit tennis balls into his underarm cavities, they were so deep and round. His face was bluish-white with brown eyes that seemed one thought behind or ahead of me constantly. Full red lips, nicotine-stained teeth, huge mouth, beer breath.

I went over his body once more to make sure I got everything right. He was silently jerking off, squinting up at the ceiling, forehead rippled down the middle. I'd been hard all along without touching myself, but when I finished my study I started to jerk my cock. I inched forward until it was hanging over his chest. I think I imagined that we were on top of an Aztec pyramid. I held a knife or whatever they used in those days to sacrifice Finn to whoever they thought they worshiped back then.

I couldn't sustain an illusion like that for more than a second or two, so I came on his chest, with a groan I'm sure. Then I leaned back and caught my breath, watching the splatters of sperm run together. The lacy pattern they formed reminded me of those tacky vests gays used to wear at the height of the disco craze. That totally wiped out the last of my lust.

Finn stopped jerking himself, closed his eyes, and lay there in the rumpled sheets, letting my sperm dry all over him.

I'd seen what I wanted to see and went into the toilet to wash off my cock in the basin. When I looked up one time I saw Finn behind me in the mirror, waiting his turn, I guess.

Part of me wanted to kill and dismember him, which I probably could have done without getting arrested, but most of me gave him -a towel, then humored him until he left.

Afterward I lay in bed putting Finn through hell in my thoughts. I tore up his body like it was a paper bag and pulled out dripping fistfuls of veins, organs, muscles, tubes. I made his voice as otherworldly as civil defense sirens had sounded to me as a kid. I drank his blood, piss, vomit. I shoved one hand down his throat, one hand up his ass, and shook hands with myself in the middle of his body, which sounds funny, but it wasn't.

When I was thirty ...

The detours around AIDS weren't marked yet. A lot of guys my age, even younger, were testing positive, sick, dead. Samson (I went to his funeral), a lot of friends and fucks I haven't mentioned, (according to the rumor mill) Henry. I avoided sex, no matter how tentative, talked on the phone, and occasionally had drinks with a few male friends-predators and aesthetes like me, as opposed to "my type."