Frisk: A Novel (Cooper, Dennis) (6 page)

One of these friends, Samuel, an actor, although he'd never actually been in any movies or plays, had grown romantically obsessed with this clerk at the Sears where he worked parttime. When Samuel described Joe one day, I got obsessed secondhand. Not only did Joe meet my strict physical requirements (pale, thin, smooth, dark hair, dark eyes, big lips, spaced-out, boyish), but his only passion, as far as Samuel could tell, was splatter films such as A Nightmare on Elm Street, etc. In other words, Joe seemed so right I got sloppy. I told Samuel, If you don't click with Joe, please play Cupid. He hemmed, hawed, agreed.

Eventually Samuel seduced the boy. I'd been trying to downplay my interest, but when Samuel called one night, post-sex, disappointed because Joe turned out to be this extremely serious masochist, I insisted he introduce us. He said he would, though he'd already passed Joe the telephone number of some character actor who was notoriously sadistic in bed.

Samuel spent much of the weekend coaching me with Joe trivia so I could waltz into Sears the following Tuesday and meet him, totally primed. Tuesday morning Samuel called. Hold off, he said. Joe hadn't shown up for work. A week passed, no Joe. A month, two.

One day there was a sketch in the newspaper of a seemingly pretty young man. Cops had found an anonymous, dismembered corpse in the yard of that very character actor. They asked for anyone who recognized this conjectural portrait (apparently drawn from the corpse) to contact them. Samuel said it looked a little like Joe, he couldn't be sure, and I'm not sure the cops ever figured out who the corpse was.

The case was perfect fodder for my interest in sexual death. I grew obsessed for a year, following it through the media, researching Joe's life via friends of friends, filling in blanks with my own fantasies. I even spent several months trying to channel the info I'd gathered into an artsy murder-mystery novel, some salvageable fragments of which are interspersed through the following section.

TORN

1986 (1987)

Thursday night, Friday morning

Joe pried up the trapdoor. He crouched, aimed a flashlight beam into his basement. The view was milky with cobwebs, so he kicked a hole. That framed the top several rungs of a rope ladder. He studied them for a few seconds, shrugged, and jumped into the black.

Thud.

He ran his light over the concrete walls, found a few nails where tools used to hang. Now there were shadows of saws, hammers, wrenches. A wooden shelf held some crumbly newspapers. He riffled through. They spewed ticklish dust. "Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-choo!" Between two comics sections somewhere near the base of the pile, he spied the buttocksshaped end of a large, white bone. When he drew the thing out, it was sixteen, seventeen, eighteen inches long.

"Hmm." He forced one end of the bone into the back pocket of his faded jeans.

The floor of the basement was empty, apart from some waterlogged, mass-market paperbacks off in a corner. Softcore porn, detective novels, sci-fi, etc. He razed a garish stack with one kick.

Climbing the rope ladder, he tried to imagine his skeleton folding and straightening out inside his skin, but his knowledge of bodies was slight, and his brain such a weakling it couldn't conceptualize a crisp image.

The phone rang. His answering machine picked up. It was his friend Samuel, who mentioned switching on channel 9. Joe laid the bone on the dining room table. Dropping into an armchair, he reached out and snagged the remote control unit.

An old man was strangling a boy. He winced, squealed, gulped, pleaded. A shorter old man held a knife an inch or two from the boy's chest. It was sporting an Iron Maiden T-shirt. The men laughed and eyeballed each other. One winked. Then the shorter man shoved the blade into Iron Maiden's intricate logo.

Joe opened his eyes after what felt like seconds but could have been hours. The cigarette had burned out. At the spot where its nub came to rest on the fabric, smoke rose in a wavering column. Far off, his TV set framed some completely uninteresting static.

He slapped the smoldering arm, switched off the TV, headed upstairs, and caught a few hours of actual sleep in his bed.

When his coffee got cold the next morning he studied the bone he'd found, occasionally rubbing his own bones by way of comparison. It almost matched the size and shape of the one in his forearm. Still, his seemed a little less round. Hard to tell through the padding and shit. He squeezed his shoulders. Their bones were overly complicated. He felt down his body. Ribs, too flat and delicate. There was nothing particularly worthwhile in his waist, as far as he could surmise, so he skipped to his hips, which reminded him of a Mobius strip.

Pushing his jockey shorts down to his knees, he started studying the hipbone, digging into its hollows and nooks with his fingertips. He bent over, spread his legs, knelt, squatted ... He'd never realized how inventive his skeleton could be. It had just been in storage inside him for twenty-six years, like a piece of unfashionable sculpture.

He pulled up his shorts, hit the kitchen, dumped chilly coffee, and washed out the cup.

Trotting back down the hall he punched PLAY on his phone machine. Samuel's message played again, only this time he sounded depressed. Shit, Joe thought, glancing up at the clock. 8:47.

Rrrring, click. "Hello?" Samuel said groggily.

"It's me." Joe despised his own voice. It was too deep or something. No matter how he distorted it, it had the fake homeyness of those DJs announcing classical music or soft rock.

"Oh, Joe. Hi. You got my message? Did you catch anything of that show I mentioned?"

"I'm not sure," Joe said. "I sort of fell asleep."

"Too bad." Samuel snorted. "That actor you look like, Keanu Reeves, was getting physically fucked up by psychopaths."

"How come?"

"How come what?"

"How come they fucked him up?"

"I don't know, who cares," Samuel muttered, yawned. "Obviously because he was so fucking cute."

Joe yawned, eyed the greasy brown clock face set into his distant stovetop. 8:53. "Bye. I'll see you at work."

Click.

(I'm writing this en route from LAX to Kennedy Airport. I must be insane to just take off. But I'm famous for this kind of shit. And for not thinking thoroughly. That's my friends' problem, not mine. Jealousy, that's what their idiocy is about. I'm more "experienced" than any of them. I've imagined scenes they couldn't even start to think up. And one of the things that goes on when you mentally explore a certain area of life like I do is you start to understand all of it. Or else you know exactly what you want out of it, and the rest doesn't matter. For me this want begins with a physical type. Over the years I've decided or figured out that there's a strain of the human race I'm uncontrollably drawn to. Male, younger, lean, pale, dark-haired, full-lipped, dazed looking. I think the lineage stretches back to those pictures of Henry at Gypsy Pete's. He, or they, were the original. Every guy I've wanted since has had his same basic look. I suppose in a sense it's like being involved with the same person over and over without getting bored. That's how I think of it. Anyway, it's the closest I'll get to a long-term relationship. But finding cooperative guys isn't easy, at least since I've grown so obsessed with the idea of murdering someone. That's the area of life I was hinting at earlier. And that's why I'm flying to NYC. I keep thinking about this boy Pierre Buisson who I recently saw in a porn video, All of Me. He's the most perfect human being I've seen since, well, Kevin at least. Like most porn stars these days he's a hustler on the side. Available. Through a particular escort service advertised in The Advocate. In New York. Without the mess of real relationships. Let me say before I go on that everything I do is based on an urge that I don't understand, though I keep trying to understand it.)

Friday morning

Sears had been painted light purple a month, six weeks back. That was supposed to attract a younger clientele. Instead it seemed to antagonize regulars. Joe's station was empty, apart from a few figures lingering along the border of Men's Wear and Home Entertainment. He leaned on a cash register and was quickly sucked in by an image on one of the distant TVs.

A muscular man with a flattop was holding a gun on some teenaged boys. They didn't care. They sneered and yelled things until the man fired, so many shots, even when they were sprawled on the ground, that there was obviously lots of psychological baggage concealed by the set's lack of volume.

"Great, huh?" said a nasal voice. Joe glanced at Samuel, who was hanging around in an aisle near Joe's station, straightening stacks of blue jeans. Lately he'd gotten so tan he looked Mexican. "The film," Samuel added, nodding at the distant, rectangular image.

"Think so?" Joe said cautiously. Samuel had one of those voices that could have been dripping with irony or totally serious. Who knew? "Hmm, well ..." He noticed a customer standing a few aisles away. "... Yeah, great, uh, excuse me a sec?"

Joe trotted off, holding his tie in place. Ten feet away from the customer, a short, red-haired man, he skidded to a stroll. "Hi," he smiled. "Need some help?"

The redhead looked up from the One-Half-Off rack, smiled toothily. "Couldn't hurt."

Joe suddenly had a mild deja vu. It whited out his view for a second.

"I want a nice shirt," the redhead continued through the clearing haze. "Not too elegant, but not. . . jarring."

That voice was so familiar, Joe thought, though more uncertain and/or high-pitched than usual. Obviously the guy was famous or something. "I'm a fan of your work," he mumbled, to see what would happen. - - -- - - - - - - - -- -

The redhead was stroking the sleeve of a bright yellow shirt with a cowboy-esque motif embroidered on the cuffs. He had predictably wee, freckled hands. "Is this silk?" he asked.

"Banlon," Joe said.

The redhead dropped the sleeve like it was scalding. He blew on his fingertips, and kept blowing until Joe realized he was supposed to respond, and laughed a little stiffly.

Satisfied or whatever, the redhead stuffed the sleeve back into the sleeve cliff.

Joe pretended to straighten the cliff up a bit. "Did you hear what I said?"

"Mm-hm. Thanks ..." The redhead crossed his arms, eyed the plastic tag on Joe's pocket. "... Joe."

"No problem. Anyway, you must get harassed by fans like me all the time, I guess."

The redhead smiled toothily again. "Actually, most people don't take my kind of acting that seriously, per se."

Actor, Joe thought. "Well, they're wrong. . ." He bullshitted for ten, fifteen seconds, hoping something would draw out the names of some movies or something. ". . . Anyway, what's next for you, I mean role-wise?" That should do it.

"This." The redhead shut his eyes, blanked out his freckly face. "Ready?" he whispered, not waiting for a reply. "Now." He smiled again. One hand shot upright and clenched, as though wielding a knife or sword. He jabbed "it" in Joe's general direction a few times. "Imagine you're ... screaming ... spurting blood," he said through clenched teeth.

Joe's cock hardened instantaneously. He was reaching down to conceal it when .. .

"You wish," Samuel sniffed from somewhere behind Joe. He'd joined them without either one noticing.

The redhead shoved his hands into his pants pockets, glanced at Joe's crotch, mumbled something to Samuel, and walked away without buying anything.

Joe could feel his cheeks burning. "Oh, hi, Samuel, uh ...'

"Listen, Joe," Samuel whispered as soon as the redhead was out of earshot. He looked unusually emotional. "Watch yourself around Gary. I'm talking major sadist, okay? One time this cute `ex' of mine accidentally went home with him and. . ."

Joe leaned close.

(We're over Kansas, for the record. It's flat with a few scattered buildings and roads. The interior of the plane is more interesting. I don't mean the seats and stuff. I mean two rows ahead of me there's a Belgian or Dutch family of various ages and sexes, all clumped around one aisle seat, doting over its occupant, a boy, maybe twenty. I just noticed them. He has a great profile, sharp nose, full lips, big eyes, thick brown bangs. That's all I've been able to see as of yet. But it's enough. Weird how his family's fawning. He's my type, for sure, but I know from experience that my type's not standard, though most people admit that my type's pretty hot. Hmm. I'm in a window seat. There's no occupant on the aisle. Across the aisle some older guy and his wife are tipped back in their seats asleep. Great. See, I've gotten a hard-on just based on this glimpse of the boy. And planes make me horny in general, because they're so cramped or something. So I'm unzipping my jeans and removing my hard-on. There, great. It's one of those inexplicable things. The more I look at that pampered boy, the worse I want to do something intense to him. I don't like to use the word "sex" because what I'm interested in is more serious, though it resembles sex superficially. That's what happens when you're so specific about the kind of partner you want. It's not just hot stuff with cute guys who look vaguely alike. It means perfecting your feelings for them, or dissecting their seeming perfection, or ... Shit. Like right now, if I could coerce that boy into one of the jet's little toilets with me, I'd turn psychotic, I'm sure. Actually, it's more like my body would lose it, and I'd be observing the damage it does from a safe place inside.)